Posts Tagged ‘VMware’

VMware Fusion – not yet ready for me?

December 27, 2007

The installation of guest OS was smooth and interface is nicely designed as in other Mac applications. It was nearly an unattended installation (e.g. no question asked about FAT/NTFS format for the HDD and VMware Tools were installed automatically once XP installation was done) and it was faster than what I did earlier on my PC with C2D 6420 + 2 Gb RAM.

Too bad I found that no settings were available for display resolution (I could adjust that in guest OS whereas for VMware workstation I have to do that before starting XP Pro) and no dual monitor support. VMware Communities confirm this feature isn’t available yet.

The ‘unity’ feature looks weird but could be useful. It’s like blending spaghetti with noddle.

VMWare

December 27, 2007

Tried Parallels as I said here. I have also just tried VMware Workstation 6 for Vista. I have built ubuntu 7.10 and XP Pro on my C2D PC running Vista. Experience is better than Parallels both at installation and running them.

There are few distinct good things about VMware

  1. VMware let you decide how many cores for your guest OS
  2. VMware supports more than 1 monitor (upto 10 if you have that many available to your host OS)
  3. networking between OS is a lot easier using NAT, network address translation
  4. the guest OS runs on a file instead of a partition of my HDD

I’ll be trying an evaluation copy of fusion on my MacBook. For $79.99 I think it’s a good deal. VMware for Windows costs a lot more at $189. Again I prefer not to run ubuntu from a partition ‘cos I have dual monitor so I could be doing a few things at once.

I’ll have to find out if VMware requires XP Pro w/SP2 for installation. I don’t believe so as VMware forms a layer between OS X and the guest OS therefore not having direct access to MacBook’s hardware hence shouldn’t be requiring SP2 in order to run BootCamp?!