Dual monitors, and VMware
Dustin Decker
dustind at moon-lite.com
Thu Jan 2 17:30:31 CST 2003
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 |
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