VirtualBox and Qemu networking

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2007 at 11:54:58AM -0400, Kevin Cozens wrote:
> If it is free for Linux, it could be worth looking at. The problem I see is 
> the lack of useful information on the vmware website.
> 
> They don't indicate which operating system you need to run in order to use 
> the evaluation software that they send via e-mail as part of their 
> "Virtualization starter".

Well vmware workstation for linux should run on any linux distribution
that is running on x86 (or x86_64 too with the right 32bit libraries).
They have an rpm version (which I have never used) and a .tar.gz which
has a handy perl installer that I use to load it into /usr/local/bin
(and a perl uninstaller that cleans up perfectly too).  I believe
someone has played around with making ubuntu/debian packages but I have
never actually looked at them.

> It doesn't list how fast a machine you need to use vmware or how much 
> slower things will be in the guest OS when using vmware. My machine is slow 
> compared to modern machines. I notice a drop in performance when running 
> Windows programs using Wine. I also notice that running something via Qemu 
> is slower than running the same thing natively.

qemu is an emulator, hence it is slow.  Of course because it is an
emulator it doens't require an x86 system to run on.

vmware is NOT an emulator, it just virtualizes the ahrdware (so hardware
access are emulated), while software runs natively on the system cpu
with no translation.  The main requirement for decent perforance with
vmware is RAM.  You need the ram for your host system plus the ram
needed for the guest as if each was running seperately pretty much to
get that kind of performance.  Other than that it is no big deal.  Of
course you do not get direct3D and such since it isn't going to emulate
a 3D video card.  It does provide drivers for windows (and X has native
vmware drivers already) which are optimized to know that they are
dealing with emulated video and hence get very good performance.  Linux
guests also get a vmxnet driver to use instead of the emulated pcnet32
which gets the same benefits of knowing that it isn't real hardware and
bypassing the emulation.

> None of these virtualization sites make it clear whether I can make use of 
> an existing Windows partition or whether I need to do a Windows install 
> within the virtual environment along with installing all the other Windows 
> apps I may want to continue using.

You can use an existing windows partition, and I have done so.  You have
to install the right device drivers in a seperate profile within windows
to do it though, and then select the hardware profile at boot that
matches where you are running windows.  Laptops with docking stations
used to use different profiles in windows too before docking stations
where hotplug capable.

--
Len Sorensen
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