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Which OS Makes the Best VMWare Host?
Posted by
Cliff
on Sat May 20, 2006 08:55 PM
from the better-than-a-multi-boot dept.
from the better-than-a-multi-boot dept.
astrojetsonjr asks: "A few days ago, Trillian_1138 asked about running Linux on a laptop. Yagu started a thread suggesting the use of VMWare to allow running multiple flavors of Linux and Windows at the same time. Lots of readers then posted their success stories using VMWare . My primary machine is an IBM laptop and I'm getting ready to move to using VMWare to allow me run Linux, Solaris and Windows at the same time. First, what is the OS/distro with which you have had the best success hosting VMWare? Finally, what host OS install and setup tips do suggest?"
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Advice for Linux on a Laptop? 276 comments
Trillian_1138 is seeking your advice on the following: "So I'm looking at replacing my aging laptop. I have a desktop running Ubuntu, which I use as a primary, and it is more than adequate for my needs. However, I'd love a small, portable laptop to use in class and on trips. I've been looking at the MacBook Pros and, more recently, the MacBooks, and was almost ready to buy the low-end MacBook and be done with it. I liked its ability to dual-book to Windows for a couple of school-related programs, but the more I thought about it the more I like using Ubuntu at home and the less reason I saw to buy a Mac if I could use Ubuntu on a laptop. This brought me to the idea of buying a laptop to use as a dual-boot Linux/Window machine, either with Linux or Windows pre-installed, and setting up a dual-boot with the other OS. Might any of you have advice, anecdotes, success stories, horror stories, or general input?"
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Which OS Makes the Best VMWare Host?
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Priorities first. (Score:5, Informative)
Let me answer your question with a question (Score:5, Informative)
(http://people.connexer.com/~roberto)
Which OS Makes the Best VMWare Host?
Why do you want to run VMWare? I have used both VMWare and qemu (as well as Xen, but I don't think that will work if you are interested in running Windows), and have found qemu to be the superior of the two. Sure, there is no built in GUI, but there are external 3rd party GUIs available if you want. Seriously, qemu makes networking much easier thatn VMWare does. No need to mess with modules (unless you want the accelerator, which I recommend), no need for services or daemons running like with VMWare. Additionally, it is open source, which I consider a huge plus. You can also emulate other CPUs. Want to emulate a PowerPC so that you can test compiling your app on FreeBSD on a PowerPC processor? How about Sparc? The *only* way in which I would see VMWare as being superior is if you are using one of their server consolidation products (GSX or ESX, I think). For workstation-level stuff, qemu is the way to go.
Don't forget coLinux (Score:5, Informative)
(http://spiritraveller.blogspot.com/)
Basically, it is a Linux kernel patched to run under Windows.
Re:Don't forget coLinux (Score:4, Informative)
(http://spiritraveller.blogspot.com/)
Worked great last time I used it, although the configuration involved editing text files.
The last release came out in February. That's recent enough to indicate that it's still being developed.
Re:Let me answer your question with a question (Score:5, Insightful)
What is it with people and their desire to try and disseminate your reason for having or wanting to, God forbid, purchased a software package. Mostly I hear it from people who -
- don't use VM's for business work
- don't like commercial software
- don't understand that time == money
- have more time on their hands than pending tasks
It's one thing to not want to purchase software, fair enough - but let's not try and stone people.
Fact is, vmware out of the "box" runs and runs very well. It's a dead simple system to use even with an unsupported distro like Slackware linux. It's $199 USD (for workstation) and the cost of the purchase is long forgotten after the ease of use has saved you many times more. There's a lot more "messing around" with other solutions. You can burn up $199 in wages in half a day.
The difference between a functional package and a usable -and- functional package often isn't a lot but it's a small difference that a lot of people are more than happy to pay for.
vmware server or workstation? (Score:2, Interesting)
Under Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.shevix.net/)
However, to be honest, on a laptop it likely makes more sense to run the host as WinXP. With Linux hosting and XP in Vmware, you don't get hardware graphics acceleration (perhaps in either OS.) Linux and laptops are still not there yet, so you may as well use XP as the host OS and get full hardware support.
Linux can be stripped down (Score:1, Interesting)
I've never used it under XP, and never on a laptop, but you might want to consider that with Linux you can tune everything (filesystems, kernel, etc), remove stuff you don't use (printer daemon, etc), etc.
VMWare ESX (Score:4, Informative)
(http://danpat.net/)
http://www.vmware.com/products/esx/ [vmware.com]
Re:VMWare ESX (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.webninja.com/)
So obvious (Score:1, Funny)
It depends... (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://bestpractic.es/)
The core issue is which OS are you more familiar with? If that isn't an issue, then there are some benefits to the *nix side of things.
It's possible to get a linux install down to 200~ megs while only using 64 megs of system memory, which is a strong advantage. If I understand correctly ESX Server is essentially a very very thin linux distro. That should say something
I've also read of a perl script that can make hot backups of a Virtual Machine; while this is possible under Windows using commercial products, it's another thing to be taken into consideration.
Hope this helps
On my laptop.... (Score:3, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Monday March 20 2006, @08:33PM)
So, as a Linux user, I run Linux as the host, and Windows XP & 98 as the guests.
That's my situation anyway. Things work fine on my laptop under Linux, and I hope my next laptop will be even better (since I'll be ditching ATI on the laptop for Intel (and a linux pre-install, which should give the "works with linux" guarantee even if I don't keep the original install around (plus, I get to give a distro money!)), which will likely make things even easier.)
Depends on your hardware. (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.thenorth.com/apblog | Last Journal: Monday February 13 2006, @07:48AM)
On the other hand, if you're running a laptop or have some high end video or hard disk that requires drivers not available for linux, you may find your performance better under Windows (again, depending on many things, like how you configure vmware and its use of hardware).
There's no perfect answer to your question. My plans for new LAPTOPS will be to run the native drivers with Win32 as the host. Custom build desktops, however, I may well run the opposite way.
Linux and XFS (Score:4, Informative)
VMWare Server supports Ubuntu as a host. It's a little easier to setup XFS and VMWare on Ubuntu. VMWare server claims experimental support for Ubuntu Dapper. I am running it on two servers for testing and it is performing very well. As Ubuntu gains popularity, the choice may be clearer. For right now, Google University has more help for VMWare on Red Hat^W^WCentos than Ubuntu.
If your system is AMD64/EM64T, you may be tempted to load a 64-bit OS. Resist the temptation. VMWare now claims official support for x64 host operating systems, but in practice these are more trouble to get working than they are worth (MUI, authentication, and even stability can be problematic IMO). With hardware that supports 64-bit virtualization (many new Pentiums and Opterons), 64-bit guests can be run on both 32- and 64-bit hosts. Determining whether your CPU supports it is so difficult, VMWare made a tool to do it for you called the processor check utility. (It's about halfway down this page [vmware.com].) Down the road when 4GB+ is standard on laptops, VMWare's x64 support will probably be a lot better.
Re:Linux and XFS (Score:4, Insightful)
Even worse story for crashes. I've had to go to backup many times because a heavily used system locks up and XFS gets into it's unable to find superblocks or another one of it's infamous cryptic, non documented bugs/errors. I don't recall ever having to do this on a ext3 system unless the disk went bad or it crashed multiple times without a fsck.
That said, XFS is an excellent choice is some areas, such as realtime (soft guarentee) systems, etc.
Depends on what you need... (Score:5, Informative)
VMware needs kernel hooks to provide its virtualization services. Under Linux, there are only a few supported Linux distros (and specific versions at that) that have pre-built modules installed as part of VMware. I run my personal VMware on an FC5 Linux host, and had to download an unsupported "patch" (from one of the VMware developers -- not even hosted on the VMware web site) to allow the vmware-config.pl script to build the necessary modules for my specific kernel. Every time I upgrade kernels, I must then rebuild the modules to get VMware working again. Also, under FC5 with SELinux enabled, I had to manually change the context of one of the VMware files after install before SELinux would even allow VMware to run. Under Windows, all of the above "just works".
Under Linux, I get better performance when running multiple VM's at the same time. I have had three 384MB VM's running at the same time, and because of memory management under Linux I only saw an increase of approximately 600MB vs. not running the VM's (no swap increase either). I also have better I/O performance as well. When installing the 3 VM's above, I had the CD's mapped to ISO files on the same disk that my VMware files were being created on. During the install, my load average was constantly around 15 and my system was definitely slower, but it was still functional. I have brought a Windows host (with enough memory to host both VM's fully in RAM -- no swapping) to its knees trying to install just 2 VM's simultaneously in the same way (ISO files on the same disk as the VMware files). It was so unresponsive, it took almost 5 minutes to bring up Task Manager to see what was going wrong -- and Task Manager didn't really show me what was wrong, just that the CPU was pegged and the VMware processes were doing all the work.
Emacs! (Score:1, Funny)
Linux more responsive in my experience. (Score:1)
I've enjoyed using VMware at home and the office. I haven't had a chance to try Xen or qemu. Briefly, here's my experience:
At the office, I work with 5 quad processor (dell) servers with Gentoo Linux as the host running VMware GSX and 1 running VMware Workstation -- all guests are Windows 2k or 2k3. At home, I run VMware Player on Kubuntu, and VMware Server on a W2k3 server and a Gentoo server -- some guests are Windows, some are Linux.
Usually everything works great. The Linux host systems seem more responsive than the Windows host systems. At home, the w2k3 server crashes every once in a while limiting me more than I'd like. Not sure why as it's just a file and dns server. One of Linux servers at the office had too small a partition for /tmp causing problems, but otherwise been relatively maintenance free.
Over the past few years one of my favorite things to do when I need to rebuild my workstation is to image it into a VMware session for later use as needed. Only done it about four times, but sure comes in handy. I'm about to do that to my w2k3 server.
Cheers.
Parallels Workstation on Mac OS X (Score:1)
(http://www.letter-x.net/~ebooher/ | Last Journal: Thursday January 13 2005, @11:45PM)
QEMU on Gentoo Linux (Score:2)
(http://libtom.org/)
You can save yourself the money and just use QEMU. It emulates a PC just fine and can run most anything as a guest. I use it for a Windows guest so I can write my book. Granted my workstation is a "bit" high end, but when I full screen it, it's just like running a real Windows box (shudder).
Trick is to make sure the KQEMU accelerator is loaded and running correctly. Which isn't really hard if you know how to run
Tom
Debian (Score:3, Informative)
(http://www.pobox.com/~meta/ | Last Journal: Sunday February 29 2004, @09:19AM)
Linux as guest (Score:1)
(http://www.idiom.com)
The VMWare web site has info on this and on fixing other clock problems: http://www.vmware.com/support/kb/enduser/std_adp.
Linux. I have no choice. (Score:2, Interesting)
After struggled for 1 week (trying to rebuild the windows install CD to include the driver, etc), I installed VMWare Server in linux, installed XP in a virtual machine directly accessing the harddisk, installed the SATA driver and eventually got a working windows which boot from BIOS.
http://fat-penguin.mocasting.com/p/55116 [mocasting.com]
Linux makes for a better host.... (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.ev4.org/)
If a usb device has no driver under linux then it can be passed straight through and driven by an os running under vmware (you have to unload native linux drivers for any device you want passed to vmware), the windows version works differently in that you must have a native driver installed before you can pass a device to vmware. This issue has manifested itself many times when we've been at customer sites and presented with a random usb device (usb to serial adapters mainly) for which windows requires extra drivers (and linux includes drivers in the default kernel).
Performance - networking runs much faster when vmware is running atop linux, this is especially important for me as i`m often doing pentesting which involves lots of network scanning...
Security - you can nat your windows images behind your base linux install, your base linux can have everything turned off to minimise the chances of it being exploited (windows will often not let you turn some services off)
And finally, try vmware server as opposed to workstation, you can run it headless and only attach a gui when you want one..
the real trick to any virtualization (Score:1)
(http://www.suspectedterrorist.net/)
your processor, gobs and memory and fast storage.
In VMware
---
Under Linux you would go to Edit -> Preferences -> Memory (tab)
and choose Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host ram.
this will greatly boost speeds as nothing is swapped to disk
---
to speed up your resuming of virtual machines you would go to
Edit -> preferences -> priority (tab) and uncheck Take
and restore snapshots in the background.
this one is significant for those vm images with more 512MB.
---
also a fast hard drive helps as well, if you got a laptop with
a 4800/5400rpm drive, it's going to be a lot slower than a 7200
rpm drive.
---
inside of your guest environments, trim it down
* disable 3d screensavers
* disable unneeded services
e.g. do you really need apache or iis running
in the background
---
if you are not using your host environment for anything,
trim it down as much as you can.
---
If you want to be able to access external storage
inside your vmware guest, use usb, forget firewire,
vmware doesn't support those kinds of devices.
---
Laptops that support disabling HyperThreading is often
there for the reason it WILL overheat, disable it when
using VMware, cuz it WILL overheat.
---
if your clock is running slow in your linux guests, try the following link
http://www.vmware.com/support/kb/enduser/std_adp.
better yet, before you even try that, make sure you install vmware-tools
to your linux guest. DO BE AWARE ANY KERNEL UPGRADES BREAKS THESE TOOLS,
AND YOUR PERFORMANCE WILL SUFFER.
for window guest os, also install these tools, but you won't have the same
breakage problem.
---
Performance of NAT vs Bridging, NAT is slower and if you try to run security
audit tools such as nessus or nmap, you will start getting network time-outs
until a slot becomes available.
---
Another tip, once you build your guest environment, run all your apps at once
and check your memory. If you find that you aren't utilizing all that memory,
adjust it accordingly in the VMware guest settings.
---
some example VMs I run on a daily basis are 384MB ubuntu drapper drake OS for
personal work station (email, gaim, browsing, open office), security auditting
vm (384MB|bridged networking!) and Windows 2003 Enterprise + Visual Studio 2005
+ SQL Server 2005 + BizTalk 2006. I run all 3 simultaneously without any
real hiccups on a laptop whose host os is ubuntu.
VmWare (Score:1)
(http://www.matt-and-kim.com/)
My experience is either (Score:1)
On it I ran 2 virtual machines, one with a full blown oracle installation on Linux running a 10GB database. The second VM was running W2K with apache/tomcat/jboss. I used this machine to teach loadtesting classes with this as the web/database server taking the load and it performed spectacularly.
At home I moved off of XP because I got tired of having to call Microsoft for reactivation keys and started running Linux. When I NEED XP I use VMware and also use it to check out new distros.
In both situations I felt as if VMWare were hardly running and also sheilded my main OS from dying when things like Oracle got really busy. I had the option of running Oracle on my main OS but just found it much more conveniant to run in the VM. The T41 was no dog when it came to performance but I was very surprised how well it handled 3 OSes.
The most important thing with VMWare is RAM. 2GB was fine. At home I have 4 and that's nice. People ask "WHY do you need 4GB?!" and I try to explain VMWare and the many wonderous benefits of it but usually wind up with a response of "Why don't you just use Lilo or Grub?".
A related question. (Score:1)
(http://ensilzah.deviantart.com/)
I was wondering if there are any solutions that let you switch quickly between OSs without all the overhead, sort of like hibernating one OS and dehibernating another?
VMware is free now! (Score:1)
Just when I was running out of rackspace! (and electrical outlets)
http://www.vmware.com/products/gsx/ [vmware.com]
Not ask slashdot (Score:1)
(http://fnarg.com/)
Depends... (Score:1)
I've run VMWare and it works well under Windows 2000 and Windows XP (can't say about Windows 2k3). The only issues are to have tons of RAM and a fast HDD. Having multiple cores (whether multi-core CPUs or multiple CPUs) is a nice boost as well.
Don't use primary PC (Score:2)
(http://willcode4beer.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday May 12 2005, @07:33AM)
Note: this was for J2EE developemnt.
Re:syntax highlighting yes, IDE no (Score:2)
(http://nystrom.nl/ | Last Journal: Sunday April 03 2005, @02:17PM)
Re:VMWare on a laptop will choke (Score:2)
Re:VMWare on a laptop will choke (Score:2)
Re:OS/2 (Score:1)
(http://www.outoftheboxsolutions.com/ | Last Journal: Monday April 17 2006, @10:36AM)
Serenity Virtual Server [serenityvirtual.com]
Allows you to run Windows, Linux and OS/2 as both a host and guest OS, and FreeBSD as a host-only OS.
Re:VMWare on a laptop will choke (Score:2)
(http://wolfrdr.tripod.com/linuxtips.html | Last Journal: Thursday November 08, @08:35PM)
You know what you doing.
Move all "zig".
For great justice.
Re:VMWare on a laptop will choke (Score:1)
(http://www.rftp.com/)
Performance evals with pre-release software can be problematic in general... and in the case of the current VMware "Server" pre-releases, you just need to look at their support forums to see that a) a number of users complain about disk performance, and b) that the product's DEBUG settings are forcibly in the ON state, which (it is claimed) is causing skewed performance results.
And then there is the notorious laptop disk [non]performance...