news.com.com — VMware, an EMC subsidiary whose software lets multiple operating systems run on the same computer, is expected to announce next week that it will begin giving away one of its key products for free, CNET News.com has learned.
Feb 3, 2006 View in Crawl 4
josephcFeb 3, 2006
No its there. I am able to play some DirectX 9 apps like "The Movies" and "The Sims 2" in WinXP on VMPlayer for Linux. It not only works, but it works fine at 800x600 with my NVidia Opengl driver.
mtupkerFeb 3, 2006
Has anyone been able to confim that this is really going to happen. I'm having a hard time believing it. It would be nice though.
masterdwarfFeb 3, 2006
This is cool to see.
rushabhFeb 3, 2006
mtupker: wait for next week. I'm sure they'll announce at the earliest.
Closed AccountFeb 3, 2006
We've been using ESX for nearly a year and it's just incredible. The only thing you really need to be concerned with if you're going to run it is how much RAM you have available. We're running about 6 guests on it, 3 are linux-based, and we're hitting the ceiling due to RAM. All this on a single Dell 2850 server with 4 gigs of memory. Another great thing about VMWare products is they allow you to tinker. You could try a new linux distro every hour until you settle on one you like or has features you want to use. The network config of each guest is nicely transparent to the host as well. Also, with destructive filesystems, you can take snapshots of a running guest OS and make a scary adjustment, and if it fails you just reload from the last snapshot and try something else. Yet another plus is the ability to reboot quickly. Since it's doing hardware emulation than actually waiting for real hardware (you know how long SCSI bios' take to think about starting up), rebooting a 2k3 server under ESX is lightning fast. I just can't say enough about VMWare and their products, they just make some of the best software I've ever seen.
clunderFeb 8, 2006
I got this vmware server running on XP media center. Works great I have XP pro, Linux and even Mac OS X. No need for server 2003 :)
srk052004Jul 19, 2006
Well, I have just struggled for hours with the "free" server, and I think it's junk. True, I am not a computer expert, just a amateur who managed his own dual-boot Linux system before it was fashionable to do so. Leaving aside the extraordinary slowness, it does not offer USB support, even though it's supposed to. True, maybe this costs $200 for the "workstation" ($100 academic price), but if the company is going to put this out for "free" it should make it functional.