[wplug] VmWare

[Patrick Wagstrom]

Weber, Lawrence A wrote:
> For embedded product development I usually use PC's dedicated to either 
> Linux or Windows.  Dual booting is a pain.
> 
> For my next project it has been suggested that I use VmWare to run both 
> op sys simultaneously.  I have not seen VmWare for many years and 
> remember it being somewhat limited.  Without starting a war here, can 
> anyone identify any serious limitations of VmWare?

Assuming you're working for a corporation which has some money in the 
budget, what you'll want is VMWare Workstation.  It does have a few 
limitations folks should be aware of, but for development they're not that 
big.  The first, is that disk access is slow (it's better if you're using a 
physical drive instead of a disk image, but still it's bad).  This problem 
is endemic to all virtualization environments.  The second, which is also 
present on all environments (except for some weird patches to Xen), is that 
you don't get direct access to the hardware.  So if you've got specialized 
PCI cards that you use for programming devices, it's not going to work.  On 
the other hand, if you program devices through parallel/serial/usb, you'll 
be fine.

As far as limitations specific to VMWare, there really aren't any.  It's 
the market leader for a reason -- it's very good software.  I've seen a few 
comments about trying out Parallels or VMWare server, but neither of these 
will give the experience you want.  Parallels is designed for single 
instances of desktop apps and the acceleration drivers are not as robust as 
VMWare (in my tests, network I/O for parallels was about 35% of VMWare). 
VMWare server is not designed to be directly interacted with -- especially 
version 2 (which has a hokey web interface).  VMWare Workstation also has 
some nice features for creating snapshots, etc.

If you've got the RAM for it, VMWare is a great way to do development.  On 
my laptop with 2G of ram, I usually have it set up so one monitor is 
showing a full screen Linux desktop while the other shows Windows.  Works 
out very nicely.

--Patrick