On Tue, Jan 10, 2006 at 03:01:58PM -0700, Penguin Lover Tom Smith squawked: > QEMU appears to have functionality similar to VMWare (I haven't tried it > yet). I'm curious to here other Gentoo users' experience with this > software. I will be using in a production environment so stability and > uptime are very important, as are reasonable performance. > > I would very much appreciate any feedback you all can give me about your > experience with QEMU.
While I can't really vouch for stability and uptime, QEMU is a great piece of software. I run it on my Dell D600 laptop with the kernel accelerator (kqemu) enabled. From it I run Win XP SP2 with no problems, and it is fairly fast (faster, at least, then my old 800Mhz pentium 3 running the same software natively). On the other hand, my uses of it are limited to 1) Microsoft Office: I have a legit copy, so might as well use it, especially when sometimes people send me Word or Powerpoint files to edit. 2) Windows Media Player: wmv9 has some funky drm built in that mplayer can't deal with. Some foreign news websites I frequent uses that horrible codec for streaming media. The sound can get flaky at times, but it doesn't affect anything else. You might need to look carefully at the documentation for the network side of things. I only run it with --user-net which puts the VM behind a virtual firewall, which might make some things on the Windows side with regards to network sharing break. Also, QEMU being a complete emulator, it can't be used like CrossoverOffice/Wine where you only run the software desired. You have to start the VM, and run Windows from it. Which runs into a bit of licensing issue: technically, if I read Microsoft's stance on this correctly, you would need a separate license for each of your VMs, and at that point, if you have x86 hardware, you might as well run Windows natively. Of course, I might be wrong, but that is something you should worry about. I think software-wise QEMU is pretty good. But there might be a few tripping stones on the deployment-side for you to watch out should you go with using it in a corporate environment. HTH, W -- "The problem is some dead white males didn't strict themselves to writing literature." ~DeathMech, Some Student. P-town PHY 205 Sortir en Pantoufles: up 59 days, 14:39 -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
