stuart test blog

For the past year or so I’ve been using Virtual PC for setting up labs for study and testing purposes, but recently I decided to give VMware Workstation 5 a go. I couldn’t believe the difference between VMware and VPC – the first major difference was the performance improvements in VMware. I had gotten used to taking three or four hours to set up a virtual machine in VPC – in VMware it was just about real-time. In full-screen mode in VMware you would be forgiven for thinking you were working on a host system – not a guest. No more stuttered key strokes or jumpy mouse movements, everything is smooth and works beautifully. The performance difference alone should make VMware the winner – I could never go back to poor performance of Virtual PC. The feature set of VMware is also far superior to Virtual PC. The networking features in VMware give you a near-endless array of possibilities. You can easily create different LAN segments and can simulate the speed of the links as well as the packet loss. A practical use for this is a lab I set up with a 100Mpbs LAN connected with a 10Mbps LAN over a 128Kbps WAN link with 1% packet loss. This gave me the chance to test some Active Directory replication issues that are faced in real life with seperate sites. When you’re setting up a complex network with several servers, LAN segments, routers, etc, VMware allows you to create a Team containing all the objects that can be managed from one screen. You can start the whole team at once and can change the boot interval between machines to allow your servers to boot before your workstations for example. Another cool feature is the PXE compliant network card in VMware guests. I recently set up an entire ADS environment in VMware which required the servers to boot off the network – this definitely isn’t possible with VPC. At one stage I had three servers (domain controller, ADS server, build server), one windows 2000 workstation, and a Freesco router all running happily together. This is all on my Centrino laptop with 1Gb of RAM. I definitely recommend you have a look at VMware Workstation 5 – you can read more and download a trial here: http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop/ws_features.html