topic Re: What VMWare product do you recommend? in Operating System - VMware

What VMWare product do you recommend?

Michael Steele_2 — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 20:10:04 GMT

For a PC running windows. And once installed I'd like to install RHEL.

Re: What VMWare product do you recommend?

Matti_Kurkela — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 00:24:38 GMT

VMware Player is free for personal use, and current versions allow the creation of your own virtual machines.

VMware Workstation requires a license, but allows VM snapshots and cloning, and apparently enables you to mount a directory from the host to the guest to facilitate moving files between the host and the guest without using any network functionality. This might be useful if you use VMs to test locked-down configurations.

You can easily move a Player-created VM to Workstation or even to enterprise versions, like ESXi.

NOTE: the enterprise versions (ESX/ESXi) are not really suitable for desktop use: with these, the VMware hypervisor entirely replaces the host OS, so you would have to convert your Windows installation into another virtual machine before installing ESX or ESXi.

MK

Re: What VMWare product do you recommend?

Michael Steele_2 — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 01:03:24 GMT

Re: What VMWare product do you recommend?

Zinky — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 13:56:37 GMT

VirtualBox is Kool 'n Easy too. Faster Graphics too.

And you can convert your VBox VM to any other Virtual Machine format - vMware or KVM even.

Or if you can do away with Windows - why not just have Fedora or Ubunu as your Desktop and host a hypervisor (vMware Server or KVM or Xen) and just host your Linux VMs plus your Windows Desktop...

Lotsa options amigo.