VMWare

[Alec Berryman]

begin  quotation of Mike Jeays on 2004-11-24 19:21:10 -0500:

> I can clearly understand its use with Windows, which needs frequent
> reboots when applying patches and for all sorts of other maintenance,
> and these changes can be made on virtual servers, including the reboot,
> without disturbing other virtual machines.

ESX server (which is what I assume you're talking about) also has the
nifty ability to selectively commit changes to the hard disk image -
for instance, if you saved the disk state, attempted to upgrade from
one FreeBSD release to the next, and it failed, you could roll back to
the previous state effortlessly.

> I didn't get a very good answer to my question about whether it was
> worth using if all the client operating systems were FreeBSD or Linux. 
> For these (much better) OSs, reboots are very rarely needed. The OS
> provides all the facilities required for protecting applications from
> one another, and sharing resources between applications in a reasonable
> way.  It is easy to kill runaway applications. So would there be much
> point in running VMWare with several guest copies of FreeBSD?

Good luck getting it to run FreeBSD in the first place.  If you search
Google, you'll find one informative thread on the community forums
that will help you getting 4.x to run, but I've yet to manage to
convince the 5.x installer that I do indeed have a hard disk.

FreeBSD is also not officially supported, as far as I can tell.  They
claim that 4.5 is a 'qualified guest operating system', but there's no
option to create a FreeBSD virtual machine - you must create another
operating system and manually edit the .vmx configuration file to
tell it that it's FreeBSD.

Linux is much better supported.

There are plenty of reasons you may want to run a Unix-like operating
system under VMWare, but if you weren't convinced by a VMWare
presentation they most likely don't apply to you.

> As another question - are there any attempts to develop an open-source
> equivalent?

Usermode Linux achieves most of what ESX does.  I don't know of
anything for a BSD.
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