[GRLUG] one OS to rule them all

[Tim Schmidt]

On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 6:42 AM, Adam Tauno Williams
<awilliam at whitemice.org> wrote:
> No clue, VMware Workstation is worth the $$$ in the amount of time is
> saves.

It's not particularly any nicer than KVM with virt-manager (
http://virt-manager.et.redhat.com/ ) these days...  Except
virt-manager is already packaged and in the repos of several major
distributions, and can seamlessly manage multiple VM servers running
qemu, KVM, or Xen.

VMWare workstation still has some features not present by default in
the various FOSS virtualization software (like 3D accelleration inside
VMs), but then so do the FOSS virtualization packages have some
features VMware does not - like a propensity for working with standard
*nix tools.  All the FOSS packages, for instance, can use raw disk
images compatible with standard disk tools like dd and fdisk.

In practice, I find the FOSS tools easier to work with and more
complete.  But it depends on what features you're looking for.  If you
want to play Sims2 in a VM, VMware is for you.  If you need to emulate
a mips or sparc box, nothing but qemu will do that for you.

--tim