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Steffen, with respect to Microsoft's VirtualPC product, here is the url to the Microsoft www page for the product and, from there you can download an evaluation guide and a deployment white paper: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/default.mspx Although Microsoft will not specifically so indicate in their product literature, the product DOES support virtualization of the Linux OS. I have used VirtualPC to test out Ubuntu, RHEL and, now, the Maemo Live CD. In the case of Microsoft VirtualPC, the host operating system has to be Windows XP or Windows 2000. Furthermore I have successfully used VirtualPC on systems running Intel X86 hardware as well as on systems running AMD Athlon (64 bit) hw. Also, please bear in mind that EMC has its own product called VMWare (several versions actually, including one called VMWare workstation 5.0 to complete more directly with Microsoft VirtualPC) that is in fact more mature and feature rich than the Microsoft product. Here is the url to the www page at the EMC www site for VMware Workstation 5.0 http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop/ws_features.html One important advantage of EMC's product is that they have a version of the product that will run with Linux as the host OS and another version that will run with Microsoft Windows XP/2000 as the host os. Although I have a copy of VMware, my operational experience is with the Microsoft VirtualPC product. It is very easy to create virtual machines with VirtualPC, but, to run effectively, I recommend that the computer running the host OS have at least .5g or ideally 1gb or more or ram and have a fairly fast X86 processor, say >= 2 ghz. Having said that, I have seen plenty of demos of software running as a VM where such demos were conducted using recent vintage laptops. My assumption is that these systems had ~2ghz or faster processors and at least .5gb of ram. One nice feature of both VirtualPC and the VMware product is that you can have multiple VM's running at the same time (subject to having sufficient real ram on your host system and sufficient processor speed). Furthermore, using the virtual ethernet switch built into the VM software from Microsoft and from EMC, these VM's can communicate with each other and with your real network using their respective protocol stacks to access all network resources including DHCP, DNS, etc.. You can see where this leads, because now you can both test and demonstrate distributed applications that may require, e.g. a www server, a database server, and a client system (e.g. Nokia 770) all on the same machine. Well not yet, for the 770 because as far as I know there is, for now, no way to emulate the 802.11 wireless link. Furthermore, for diagnostic purposes, you can run Ethereal on your Host OS to follow what is going on protocolwise in the VM environment. Another feature of Microsoft VirtualPC and, I presume, VMWare Workstation 5.0, is that after you create an X86 virtual machine you can "capture" an .iso image (Microsoft's terminology) by browsing to the .iso on the file system of the host OS. Equally, if you had first put ("burned") the .iso image onto a CD, you could "capture" the CD drive that is physically installed on the host system (i.e. bring it into the vm you have created) so that the X86 VM can load from the CD drive. I have used both approaches to install software into VM's I have created and it works fine. The VM software also allows you to pause, reset, and close any given VM. When you close the VM you are given the option to save its current state, so that it can be restarted at a later point in time exactly where you left off. In the case of Microsoft VirtualPC, each virtual machine has three files associated with it. For example, a Windows 2000 Pro VM that I created has the following three files As you can see, the vhd file is the largest. It is the virtual hard drive for the system. Windows 2000 Professional SP4 VM.vmc =>Virtual Machine Settings (config) File (~13kb) Windows 2000 Professional SP4 VM.vsv =>Virtual Machine Saved State File (~53kb) Windows 2000 Professional SP4 VM Hard Disk.vhd => Virtual Machine Virtual Hard Disk File (~2.36 gb) I should also mention that the "virtualization" performance penalty is actually not too bad, at least in the case of Microsoft VirtualPC. Microsoft people to whom I have spoken about the product say that the penalty is ~15 % or so for processor intensive applications. This is because the guest OS (i.e. the virtual machine) directly accesses the X86 hardware, i.e.the X86 instruction set is NOT emulated in software for the guest OS. I hope this helps you get started. -- Best Regards, John Holmblad Televerage International GSEC,GCWN,GGSC-0100,NSA-IAM |
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