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VMWare and Laptops

post #1 of 13
10/26/04 at 12:32am
Thread Starter 
Just curious if anyone out there has used VMWare to run Windows under linux and what success they have had with it? I am looking at running it on hopefully an AMD64 system with 2 gigs of ram, and using it to run Audition and Protools and possibly AutoCad since those are the only three windows programs I use, but I am very worried about the performance of it. I tried running it on a 256 MB AMD k7 2000+ system without to much luck, however I think that may have been more to due with the lack of memory(Resource manager showed all my memory being used even before I ran VMWare) so I am curious to see what difference adding in a LOT of memory would make on it.

Seablade
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post #2 of 13
10/26/04 at 3:00am
It's a real resource hog. However, with your setup, you should easily be able to do it. Never used either of those 2 tools before, but it ran basic MS apps (office, visual studio, ...) just fine. Performance will be okay, but don't expect anything stellar. There's about a 10-50% hit in performance, depending on what the app is doing. I haven't tried viewing USB key drives, printers, or other peripherals under windows, so don't know if you will be able to use those or not.

EDIT: Yes, memory is the key to successfully running VMWare on any system. You should get pretty decent performance. However, just in case you're not happy with the performance, you can try Wine. I know AutoCAD can run under it just fine, but don't know about the other two.

Regards,

zakaluka2.
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post #3 of 13
10/26/04 at 9:11am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by zakaluka2
It's a real resource hog. However, with your setup, you should easily be able to do it. Never used either of those 2 tools before, but it ran basic MS apps (office, visual studio, ...) just fine. Performance will be okay, but don't expect anything stellar. There's about a 10-50% hit in performance, depending on what the app is doing. I haven't tried viewing USB key drives, printers, or other peripherals under windows, so don't know if you will be able to use those or not.

EDIT: Yes, memory is the key to successfully running VMWare on any system. You should get pretty decent performance. However, just in case you're not happy with the performance, you can try Wine. I know AutoCAD can run under it just fine, but don't know about the other two.

Regards,

zakaluka2.
Well unfortunatly it is where the hit in performance happens that matters in Audio, if it is in latency or another area that will affect the recording I cant afford it.

Wine is great, however AutoCad you have to have specific versions that work well, 2004 as far as I know doesnt. Audition and Protools were pretty close to running this summer when I tried then to get em running, however I couldnt quite get them to finish loading.

I am curious about being able to use windows drivers under VMWare to run things linux cant, wonder if someone has tried it.

Seablade
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post #4 of 13
10/26/04 at 3:21pm
To run Vmware under Linux and be smooth have at least 1GB of it. I run it so I can takes apps designed for 2000 and XP and run them in that environment before porting them over to Linux. So far so good. I even have an XP install on a second HD that I boot to sometimes for all the hardware aspects, when I don't need the hardware I use vmware to get into it from linux. Nice tool and runs well as long as you full fill the hardware requirements.
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post #5 of 13
10/26/04 at 5:38pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Freejack
To run Vmware under Linux and be smooth have at least 1GB of it. I run it so I can takes apps designed for 2000 and XP and run them in that environment before porting them over to Linux. So far so good. I even have an XP install on a second HD that I boot to sometimes for all the hardware aspects, when I don't need the hardware I use vmware to get into it from linux. Nice tool and runs well as long as you full fill the hardware requirements.
Hmm So if I set up a second partitionb for XP for instance(Assuming I get an AMD 64 version of a laptop otherwise 2000 most likely) then I can set VMWare to use that same partition as well and still acess and swap files in between them, or boot off of it? That is kinda cool and unexpected, I was expecting to have to set up that partition and another one for VMWare.

Yea I have decided due to what I am looking at 2 Gigs of ram is a must, I just hope it runs my audio software decently enough, I could stand a slowdown in the drafting moreso than I could in the audio.

Seablade
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post #6 of 13
11/2/04 at 5:25am
Quote:
Originally Posted by seablade
Just curious if anyone out there has used VMWare to run Windows under linux and what success they have had with it? I am looking at running it on hopefully an AMD64 system with 2 gigs of ram, and using it to run Audition and Protools and possibly AutoCad since those are the only three windows programs I use, but I am very worried about the performance of it. I tried running it on a 256 MB AMD k7 2000+ system without to much luck, however I think that may have been more to due with the lack of memory(Resource manager showed all my memory being used even before I ran VMWare) so I am curious to see what difference adding in a LOT of memory would make on it.

Seablade

If you are having 2gb of Ram its more than enough...but disk access will be slow due to the fact you are using virtual hardisk( File) . So instead of using virutal hardisk select the option to use raw partion for vmware guest OS This would improve the read and write performance and would speed up things


But still a better option is to install 2k/xp to another partion and multiboot b/w linux and windows..
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post #7 of 13
11/4/04 at 4:28pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by seablade
Hmm So if I set up a second partitionb for XP for instance(Assuming I get an AMD 64 version of a laptop otherwise 2000 most likely) then I can set VMWare to use that same partition as well and still acess and swap files in between them, or boot off of it? That is kinda cool and unexpected, I was expecting to have to set up that partition and another one for VMWare.

Yea I have decided due to what I am looking at 2 Gigs of ram is a must, I just hope it runs my audio software decently enough, I could stand a slowdown in the drafting moreso than I could in the audio.

Seablade
VMWare also sets up a virtual network environment where you can access files via network shares. So a folder on your "host" machine can be setup to be seen as a share on the client side.

This makes it really easy to share files between environments, once it is set up.
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post #8 of 13
11/4/04 at 6:08pm
I've running Windows XP under vmware and it works great. I setup the dual booting as described on VMware site for ACPI computers, and it books no problem. But when I dual boot into windows I find that it's very very unstable, I don't get more than a few minutes out of it. Anyone had any experience with this? I'm still running VMware 3.x.
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post #9 of 13
11/5/04 at 12:28am
no problems for me after using vmware 4. and above...it works great

Then new version 4.5.2 Need bit more resource than the previous version 4
Cuz it gives each machine a dedicated 32Mb video ram in addtion to the Ram siz e specified when creating a machine

i.e if we set virtual machine's ram as 256 .....vmware will use 256+32 MB ,32overhead for video
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post #10 of 13
11/15/04 at 1:58pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by geejo
If you are having 2gb of Ram its more than enough...but disk access will be slow due to the fact you are using virtual hardisk( File) . So instead of using virutal hardisk select the option to use raw partion for vmware guest OS This would improve the read and write performance and would speed up things


But still a better option is to install 2k/xp to another partion and multiboot b/w linux and windows..
Ok so new option has become availiable to me in as far as that. Alienware's new laptop(And Sager, and tons of other people with the same ODM has hardware support for RAID 0 in it. I am wondering if that would help at all with HD access in as far as VMWare is concerned, or would it be better to set up the second HD to run the OSes off of and skip the RAID? Or would it even make a difference.

Next question I had was in regards to RAID 0 on laptops, as I have heard questions on the stability of it, namely it being very likely to crash on a laptop because of how much they get jostled, anyone have any experience with it on a laptop(Somehow I think the answer is gonna be no?

Seablade
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post #11 of 13
11/15/04 at 3:29pm
I would tend to skip the raid. Never heard about the crashing, but laptops are always moving around and HDDs are one of the first components to go. In the case of RAID-0, you can pretty much say bye-bye to all your data. Now, if you regularly back-up your data, then go with RAID-0. You will get a slight speed increase. Honestly, though, unless you're reading/writing files to/from the HDD ALL the time, RAID is not really worth it.

Regards,

zakaluka2.
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post #12 of 13
11/15/04 at 5:56pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by zakaluka2
I would tend to skip the raid. Never heard about the crashing, but laptops are always moving around and HDDs are one of the first components to go. In the case of RAID-0, you can pretty much say bye-bye to all your data. Now, if you regularly back-up your data, then go with RAID-0. You will get a slight speed increase. Honestly, though, unless you're reading/writing files to/from the HDD ALL the time, RAID is not really worth it.

Regards,

zakaluka2.
Audio editing and similar, at times it can seem like it, kinda curious to see how it does on a gig of ram dedicated to it though it may not happen so much hopefully.

Seablade
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post #13 of 13
11/21/04 at 6:20pm

alternative: QEMU

I have not tried using VMWare, so I can't give my opinion of it.

Alternatively, I'm using QEMU to run WinXP as a guest OS on top of Linux (host). So far, it seems to be stable despite lacking features (QEMU webpage has plus and minus). I haven't fully explored the software, but I think it's very promising. The QEMU website has more details. Easy to install and setup (haven't got network to work, but doing more research; can install software by mounting virtual drives on the fly).

As far as speed performance, QEMU says it is much faster based on benchmarked testing.

mr_et

http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/
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