VMWare

I've used both Microsoft Virtual PC and VMWare on my Windows PC. I've settled on VPC, because I noticed that VMWare caused a bunch of related programs to run at boot time whether any VM's were running or not. These were programs/services like VMWareDHCP, VMWareDNS, etc. (not the actual program names - going from memory).

Now I'm guessing that the only reason VPC doesn't do this as well is that it utilizes the services the the host OS (Windows) is already running for it's own use. Well, it wasn't loading anything extra, so that has been my preferred VM solution.

If I use VMWare in Linux, will it behave the same way as VPC does in Windows, or will there still be additional programs and services required to support VMWare when the host OS starts?

 

I've never used Virtual PC, but VMware works the same on Windows on Linux.

 

Those programs are used to create a virtual network to use the host to get on the Internet, so it will work the same regardless of the host OS.

 

...why is that a problem that it's been loading "extra" programs? The number of processes running isn't a metric of anything other than... the number of programs that are running. And multiple processes like VMWare has is actually a much better tactic to use with multi-core and multi-processor machines because the load can be balanced.

Under Linux I've found that VirtualBox is actually my preferred option, mostly because it's not broken with the latest kernels whereas VMWare is (it's a silly GPL symbol debate, VMWare using bits of code it's not supposed to). Basically, you're thinking of things wrong... you shouldn't count the number of programs you're running. Check to make sure that you can still run all the programs you want concurrently, and make sure they perform as you think they should, and that's all that should matter. The number of programs/processes is a worthless metric, doubly so on Linux since programs will often start extra processes instead of threads since they're just as "cheap", whereas with Windows if a program isn't a monolithic loop, it probably has threads for multi-processing.

Ok, I'm rambling now... hope that clears a bit up, though If you want a true metric, compare the performance of VMWare to VPC, and see which one runs your virtual machine faster. That's the only way to really know the best solution.

 

I usually just disable the VMware services from automatically starting up, that fixes this issue. I just have two batch files to start/stop them when I need.

 

Pitabred - I consider the number of supporting programs running to be a valid metric, because they impose a hit on available memory and processing headroom. In that regard I've always viewed it as less is just about always better. If I'm not running a VM at the time, I would just as soon not be devoting resources to it. I view it pretty much as bloatware at that point.

Now, when I do fire up a VM and am not multi-tasking between the host and VM, then you're right. It doesn't matter at all. However, as often as not I *am* bouncing back and forth between the two.

You did answer my question, though. VMWare should behave that same way under Linux as well. Thanks.

 

My point is that if a single process does all the same jobs as all the supporting programs, there is no savings. If you're not running vm's very often, then I would agree that it's a valid point. But I'm not talking about multi-tasking between the two... I'm just saying that any time the virtual machine needs something (like DNS) it only has to wake up the VMWareDNS process, rather than the WHOLE VMware host process, which provides a decent performance boost. It's more the Unix way of doing things, lots of small processes doing one thing well, rather than having one huge process doing everything.

Really, the best way to see what the actual difference is would be to run something like PCMark on the virtual machines under VPC and VMWare and see what the performance difference is. I think you'll be surprised... VMWare's distributed process architecture really is quite efficient.

 

look into using kvm. It supports intel/amd virtualization features. Also its opensource and its in the repositories. If you have a cpu that has the virtualization features, then the performance lag running complex programs/computations is usually a second to two seconds slower. It almost runs at native speed!

 

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that VPC managing all that overhead in its own way shouldn't be any more efficient than VM running the extra services, right? Well, I would agree, if it were as simple as that. With VPC all those services are *already* running. With VMWare, *additional* VMWare services have to be run, even though the Microsoft services are already in process.

I'm not sure I'm on the same page with you here, but I appreciate your input.