From: Michael Geary (Mike_at_Geary.com)
Date: Tue Mar 28 2000 - 19:13:17 EST
> > I use VMware for stuff like that. App requires Win95--or would DOS 6
> > be better? No problem, you can set up as many virtual machines as you
> > want. VMware supports these OSes in virtual machines: Win2K, NT4,
> > Windows 3.1, 95, and 98, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, DOS 6, Red Hat,
> > SuSE, Caldera, Corel, and TurboLinux, and FreeBSD 2.2x and 3.x.
> Now that's pretty cool indeed. Does it require it's own partition
> or does it just install in the Win2k partition?
Either way. VMware itself just installs in Program Files like any other app,
and each virtual machine has one or disks that it uses. These disks can be
virtual disks, which reside inside an ordinary Windows file on the host OS,
or they can be physical disks or partitions. They can optionally be
nonpersistent or undoable (when you power off the VM, VMware will discard
your changes or ask you whether to save them).
> > If an app requires unusual hardware, VMware won't be the solution. It
> > emulates fairly vanilla, typical PC hardware in its virtual machines...
> Hmm, but what about for things that MS will support in WinME but
> not in Win2000?
If you have a piece of hardware that Windows 2000 does not support, then
generally you won't be able to get to it from the VMs either. For example,
if your network card has a Win98 driver but no Windows 2000 driver, then if
you boot Win98 in a VM it won't be able to use the card either. You'd have
to boot Win98 natively to use it.
Serial and parallel printers and external modems are a different story. A
friend of mine has a printer that Windows 2000 doesn't support (or didn't at
the time he told me about this), but Windows 98 does. So he runs Win98 in a
VM under Windows 2000. He installed the printer driver on Win98 and made it
sharable, so he can print to it across the virtual network from his Windows
2000 host system.
This works because Windows 2000 and VMware support the parallel port, so the
Win98 printer driver inside the VM is able to talk to the physical printer.
> I bet [VMware is] cool. But a question is assuming I only had one NIC
> card. Would this card actually be used by Win2k, the FreeBSD or is it
> used by something else?
Windows 2000 owns the physical card and runs its networking just the same as
before. Each VM has a virtual AMD network card, and the guest OS sees that
instead of the physical card. VMware sets up a virtual network connecting
all guest OS's and the host. This network is bridged to the physical network
card, so the virtual network just looks like part of the physical network.
You can also set up a host-only network, which doesn't bridge the traffic
between the virtual network and the physical card (and doesn't require any
physical network card). Then on the host the virtual network just shows up
as another network connection. You can run routing or NAT or whatever on the
host if you want, or just leave the two networks disconnected from each
other.
> Say you have a number of partitions with linux, w95, NT4 etc in
> them, do they stay 'as is' so you can boot each O/S native if you need to?
You can do this, but you need to set up separate hardware profiles in the
guest OS for "native boot" and "booting in a VM". The VM has its own set of
hardware devices that are different from the physical machine, and when you
boot the previously installed Win98 (for example) in the VM, it will detect
the different hardware in the VM.
Anyway, www.vmware.com should have answers to most any other questions, and
I'll be happy to kick it around with anyone, but maybe we should take it off
the ThinkPad list in case anyone finds it to be annoyingly off-topic. (The
ThinkPad connection is that VMware is the answer to the question, "How can I
use my ThinkPad to replace my office full of desktop systems?" <g>)
-Mike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Thu Jan 23 2003 - 09:55:54 EST