Rants and Raves

On windows there’s basically three commercial solutions for virtualization, and several free solutions… wait one of the commercial solutions is free (well when you buy the operating system), and the other is partially free…

• Microsoft Virtual PC (runs on both servers and workstations)
• Microsoft Virtual Server (runs on both servers and workstations)
• Microsoft Hyper-V (runs only one Windows Server 2008)
• Parallels Workstation (runs on workstations)
• Parallels Server (runs on both servers and workstations)
• VMware Player (runs on both servers and workstations)
• VMware Workstation (runs on both servers and workstations)
• VMware Server (runs on both servers and workstations)
• Citrix (aka XenSource)

For Intel based Mac you have commercial solutions

• Parallels Desktop
• Parallels Server
• VMware Fusion

And for Linux you have the following commercial solutions, and many free solutions (Xen being one of the leaders)

• Parallels Desktop
• Parallels Server
• VMware Player
• VMware Workstation
• VMware Server
• Citrix (aka XenSource)

And for bare metal you have

• Parallels Server
• VMware

I’m not going to go into details on any of these, I just wanted to give at least a partial list with a few thoughts.

If you’re new to virtualization, use one of the free virtualization solutions.  You can try several of them, and many of them can convert a virtual machine from another vendor’s format to it’s own, but learn what the strengths and weaknesses are of each before you spend money on a solution that might not be the best for you.

Microsoft Virtual Server has some definite performance advantages over Microsoft Virtual PC… there are some things you might lose with Virtual Server that you might want (the local interface); but Virtual Server installs on both desktop and workstation platforms, so try it.

For Mac I definitely like Parallels Desktop better than VMware Fusion; but you may not share my opinion.  VMware claims to be faster, though I certainly don’t see it.  And I might add, that if you have a decent machine you’re running virtualization software on, fast isn’t going to be the number one concern — correctness is far more important.

Also, with each of the virtualization systems, hosts, and guests there are best practices for optimizing the installation and performance.  I’ll try and write up some information I’ve put together that keep my virtual machines running well.

For the record, I run Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 (64 bit) on Windows Server 2003 R2 x64 SP2, and on Windows Vista Ultimate and Business x64 SP1; works well.  And I run Parallels Desktop v3 on my Macs.

For the most part my guests are Windows XP Pro (x86) and Windows Server 2003 (x86); I don’t really need 64-bit guests (at the moment), but I do also run Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Free Spire, etc linux…

Like I said, figure out your requirements, play with several of the virtualization systems and spend your money on more memory, perhaps a better processor, and stick with the free virtualization software!

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