In: Root » Computers and technology » Software
VMware and Microsoft have been providing several solutions to host VMs at no charge and if you are a newbie to virtual machines it may be a good idea to inform yourself about the advantages of each product before installing it. The major players in this market are Microsoft and VMware. VMware was actually first and now offers its products for free as well. Microsoft's Hyper-V platform recently gained a crucial advantage over VMware in that it offers better live backups via Volume Shadow Service; therefore, for many experienced VM administrators, Microsoft may be the better choice. For people who want to experiment with Linux, Microsoft offers Virtual PC which works under XP and above and can be downloaded from Microsoft's Download Center. It doesn't give you as many features, yet it allows users who run Windows 7 to start their old programs straight on their desktop. You can actually see your old app inside a Windows 7 window, as if it is running on Windows 7! Those who are used to opening remote desktop or VNC to view their VM's desktop are very glad to have this new feature, but it only works under Windows 7. Virtual PC is redundant from today's perspective. Virtual Server is a little more advanced and provides a website for admins to install and monitor multiple virtual computers concurrently. It also surprises with a x64 emulation, which isn't found in Microsoft Virtual PC. A detriment of virtual PC and Virtual Server is their single CPU processor limitation. In the past, VMware was the leader and already offered technology to make use of all CPU cores and processors. After some time passed, Microsoft has worked on its own code to compete with VMware and now also has this feature implemented Hyper-V Server. In Hyper-V you can install a virtual machine directly to a physical drive and bypass VHD files altogether. Therefore there is no need to have these slow VHD files anymore if you don't want to. Imagine how much faster the guest OS can access the hard drive using direct RAW disk access! Reading and writing directly to the disk is a major speed factor and needs to be considered when you have either many VMs on the same host or very hard-drive active VMs. Some people may say Hyper-V is strong but it has a problem as well: it has to be installed on Windows Server 2008 or the lighter variant Hyper-V Server 2008. The latter is free of charge and you need to install it on a partition of its own. VMware, is the most versatile of all virtualization products and runs on all OSes. It isn't as good with backups and it's interface is rather slow. So, if you want flexibility go for VMware; if you want simplicity go for Virtual PC; Virtual Server is stable for medium performance, and VMware's nightmare is basically Hyper-V. Peter M is a software expert and writer.
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