VMware Player

I have been a (relatively) happy VMware Workstation user for several years now. I was interested when VMware announced Workstation version 7 - until I discovered that there was a significant upgrade charge.

Since VMware Player 3.0 was announced at about the same time, I thought I'd see what Player was like: and that was three weeks ago and I haven't used Workstation since.

I'm not a real techie - I just want something that will run Linux and Windows side by side, and to be able to test new OS releases before migrating to them permanently. Sun's VBox, which I looked at and rejected as feeling like a bit of a toy a year ago, hasn't really improved as far as I could see. Player, in contrast, seems a serious piece of software. VMs seem to suspend and restart faster than with Workstation 6.5.2, and the switching bar at the top of the screen takes less space which I like. I've not found anything I need to do that I could with Workstation but can't with Player. Since version 3 supports the creation of new VMs, for people like me who simply want to have multiple OSs on one box, Player seems viable - and it's a no charge item.

Many years ago - here I'm thinking about about mainframes and IBM's VM product as much as desktop VM solutions - a big question was overhead; how much of performance hit does one take when running an operating system as a guest in a VM? With the falling price of memory and processing, the question, at least for much of my work (document reading / editing, and a small amount of C++ and PHP), has become largely moot. Only rarely do I notice any performance issues. So, thank-you VMware; sometimes technology does make our lives a bit easier.