Laptops Compatible with Virtualization and Linux

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, Oct 04, 2009 at 11:11:27PM -0400, Christopher Browne wrote:
> One of my coworkers has been using VMWare for pretty much this
> purpose, for many years now.
> 
> He's a FreeBSD guy; his usual combination was to host VMWare atop
> Windows, then spawn hordes of FreeBSD instances.  (The usual point
> being that they are running PostgreSQL instances that he might kill
> off in varying ways to do tests...)
> 
> At any rate, VMWare has worked fine for him on a whole bunch of
> different laptops since the other end of the decade.  I've seen others
> using VMWare for such things on Linux since before that.
> 
> There may be merits to having special hardware to support
> virtualization, but VMWare started doing this well before that was a
> twinkle in Intel's eye.

Some vmware versions take advantage of the hardware.  It does improve
performance for some things.

> There may be reasons to avoid VMWare (hey, it's proprietary stuff, so
> RMS would not be proud :-)), but it may be worth considering...

Well the fact they are always way behind in supporting new kernels is
one reason.  Their new windows style installer that workstation 6.5 and
server 2.0 use is another reason to no longer care about them.

Now that KVM is here (and kqemu for those without the hardware support),
I have no need for vmware anymore.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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