Dual monitors, and VMware

[Dustin Decker]

On Thu, 2 Jan 2003, MdG wrote:

> Intresting stuff...dual monitors and VMWare.  Hows the performance for you
> guys in VM?  What apps are you running in Windows under VM?

I'm half ashamed to tell all what I do with VMWare, but then again most 
everyone knows I have to support a lot of that "Other" OS anyway so...

I've found that if you throw enough hardware at VMWare, something that it 
does quite well is host multiple instances of an OS for testing purposes.  
The machine I'm running it on at work has a pair of P4 Xeon CPU's at 
2.5GHz, 4GB of RAM, and 6 Atlas 10K2 Ultra160 SCSI drives on an Adaptec 
5400S RAID controller.  

Again - all apologies as I speak of Windows...  The host OS is WinXP Pro,
and I run two instances of Win2K server (both as Active Directory domain
controllers), two Win2K Pro installations, two WinXP Pro installations, 
and a single WInNT 4.0 Workstation simultaneously.  Prior to the 4GB of 
RAM, it was sluggish... but now it runs like a champ.  

What I like most about it is how easy it is to "roll back" to pre-test
conditions.  VMWare stores the filesystem for each guest OS in a single 
series of files within a folder.  I've got a default "fresh install" of 
each OS stored away on CD - each time I need to roll back I kill the guest 
session, delete the contents of the folder, and restore from CD.  It makes 
coming back to a known state no-brainer enough that I can allow my 
programmers (no offense to those types, but this _is_ windows ya know) to 
make use of the system and not worry about them hosing it to pieces.

VMWare might not be cheap - and you have to throw it a good bone on 
hardware too... but it's a lot cheaper for me than coming up with tons 
more hardware, and the real estate to house them.  As for the desktop 
issues, I can run each guest OS full screen, and switch between them by 
keystroke.  Lovely stuff...

Dustin

-- 
*-----------------------------------*
| Dustin Decker                     |
| dustind at moon-lite.com       *-----------------------------------------*
| http://www.dustindecker.com |                                         |
| Moon-Lite Computing         |  Occam's eraser:                        |
| 913.579.7117                |  "The philosophical principle that even |
*-----------------------------|  the simplest solution is bound to have |
                              |  something wrong with it."              |
                              *-----------------------------------------*