Quote:
Originally Posted by RB
Thanks for that Robin, yes I'll have to do a bit more reading first, only just starting out atm.
As I understood it VMware allows you to install the whole OS and run the whole thing like an XP virtual machine while Win 7 (XP mode) only runs the app in a window in XP mode.
When I tried to test my lappy for XP compatibility, MS said my integrated video card didn't support this graphics mode, not able to run Aero or something like that.
So I assume I would be able to run VMware on my Win 7 lappy and load an XP VMachine?
|
There are two types of VMWare. ESX which we won't go into further beyond saying that it runs on the hardware and you virtualise everything on top of it. At work we have thousands of Windows and Linux images running on hundreds of ESX servers.
The ones you are talking about are Server and Workstation which run on top of another o/s like Windows or Linux. I haven't used Fusion on Macs so have nothing to add to Chris's comments.
Server is free but I find recent versions hard work to get running.
Workstation is not free and I have it running on Slackware 12.2 on a Q6600 and on Windows XPPro 32bit on a T400. They will run just about any 32 bit o/s. Because the hardware is physically 64 bit they will run 64 bit guests.
Once you install the VMWare tools into the guest O/S it's reasonably seamless.
But you do need enough memory. I tried to virtualise Mum's Windows 98 (she refuses to stop using it) onto her XP box which only had 512M RAM. I had to plug in a 2GB DIMM before 98 would run without XP paging itself to death.