VMWARE WORKSTATION 4.X for Windows NT/2k/XP

Rating:
Summary: Disaster recovery in a box
Review: I co-locate several servers running websites and I was looking for a way of planning for disaster recovery. With VMWare I can set up my base operating system, the web sites, etc.. and create a backup of an environment that could boot easily on another server should that one go down.

I even went a step further and used Windows 2000 DFS to replicate the contents to another VMWare session. With two servers running two VMWare sessions that replicate site files to each other I have redundancy as well as the ability to recover from a downed server. If I sound like a fan, I am. I just wish I could afford the server products they put out.

This is a must buy and will change how I set up server environments going forward. And the performance is great as well.

Rating:
Summary: Really cool!
Review: I've been using VMWare Workstation for about three years now and have very few complaints. They have fixed a lot of my complaints with this latest release. The company does a much better than average job with customer service. My only complaint is the cost. You can buy a second hard drive for the price of this software and set up a dual boot configuration, which would suit me just fine, given the performance hit running an OS within an OS. Overall the perforamnce hit is not bad. I use this on my laptop where I can work in Linux and yet access office and other windows apps simultaneously. This does take up a lot of disk space and you will want a fairly beefy machine to get reasonable good performance out of your virtual machines.

Rating:
Summary: An Essential tool for Dual-booters
Review: If you live in a dual-boot world, choosing Linux/BSD sometimes and Windows at other times -- then VMware can certainly change the way you work.

Without VMware, you must reboot your system any time you need the benefits of the other operating system. (boot to Windows to run MS Project, reboot to Linux to do software development work, etc) This leads to several common problems, for example keeping your email and bookmarks in sync between two OSes. Dual-booters all know about the problems with disk partitioning as well. (Even when the tools to repartition work as intended, one often still suffers from less available free space.)

With VMWare, you have the option to run your choice of 'primary' OS at all times. Then, when you need access to the other OS all you need to do is start up a vmware session. VMware includes file system shares to facilitate getting files betweeen one enironment and the other, and it automatically supports a seamless NAT translation that allows your virtual machine to have full access to the Internet, your company's LAN, etc. Your CD / DVD player is also seen seamlessly by the virtual OS; the graphics and mouse support is also very good.

For example, I do development work in Linux but my company's VPN requires a Windows system. I've also got a large number of windows-only applications that are necessary. With VMware, any time I need my Linux environment I can start it up again in about 30 seconds - all of my server processes resume just where the system was frozen. With the seamless NAT, I can SSH from Windows into my own Linux server; this avoids the overhead of running a Linux window manager.

This product allows a try-before-you-buy option, you can download the software with a 30-day trial straight from vmware.com. Now that I've tried it for over a week, I cannot imagine going back to a dual-boot world. I have to say I'm hooked -- I came to Amazon today to make my purchase official.

Rating:
Summary: Must have for multi platform development
Review: VMware is an amazing tool. If you...
- work on one operating system but have to program for another
- work on one OS but have to program _on_ another
- have to prototype PCs for different OS configurations

You need VMware. VMware allows you to create a 'virtual machine' on your guest computer. This isn't an emulation of an operating system at all! It creates a thread and isolates hardware access. Then it just lets the guest operating sytem run as normal. The guest has no idea (or little idea) that it is running inside of another operating system.

It's fast and powerful. You can network between the guest and host, or between multiple guests. Your guest can have access to your public network and the internet. You can even mount ISO images as a virtual CDrom for your guest systems. A favorites and bookmarking system can bring up any Virtual PC you use regularly, and the whole interface is sleek, compact, and powerful.

VMware is fantastic. You do need a good computer to run it, though - each virtual machine requires hard drive space as a virtual harddrive and each currently running guest requries a goodly slice of your ram.

It's cheaper than buying a new PC that you'll rarely use, let alone the dozens of PCs you would need to duplicate all the virtual machines you can add to a single computer.