Another important host hardware characteristic is the ability to access real disk partitions and share disk partitions between VMs. ![]() The more RAM the VM software can address, the more VMs can be active at a given time. Access to RAM is a vital factor and is usually the gating factor for supporting a number of active VMs. Figure 1 shows the relationship between the VM software and host and guest OSs.Īnother key evaluation factor is how the VM software addresses the physical hardware available on the host system and provides virtual hardware for the guest VMs. Here, more is better: The more host and guest OSs the VM product supports, the more flexibility you have for installing the VM software and setting up test scenarios. The guest OSs are the OSs that the products support as VMs. The host OS is the OS platform on which you install the VM software. To evaluate their features and see which product might work best for your environment, you can use this review and the features comparison in Table 1.Īn important criterion for evaluating VM products is the products' support for host and guest OSs. VMware Workstation 4 and Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 are similar in overall functionality but have some important differences. VMware and Microsoft offer desktop VM products for Windows. This feature also makes VM software useful for setting up training scenarios in which you always want the system to start from a predefined state. Furthermore, you can set up a VM product to automatically discard your unique configuration changes when you're finished with a particular deployment scenario, letting you resume customer support from a clean slate. VM software makes it much easier to quickly reproduce a given customer scenario. IT support staff often must recreate customer deployment scenarios to solve problems. VM software is also useful for IT support departments. VM software lets you consolidate most of your testing systems onto one or two physical systems that run guest VMs for each test platform. That LAN might use a couple of test servers for domain controllers (DCs) and additional systems for each OS used in the organization. In the past, creating a test environment might have required IT to dedicate a small fleet of PCs on an isolated LAN for application testing. ![]() Another use for VM software is to create test deployment environments. Today's PCs have the processing power required to run VM software, which lets you configure one computer to run multiple OSs.Ĭompanies can use VM software to adopt new OSs (e.g., Windows XP) while continuing to run vital legacy applications that rely on earlier OSs (e.g., DOS, Windows 9x) on the same hardware. Windows IT professionals have recently discovered the benefits of virtual machine (VM) software, a technology that the mainframe world has used for almost two decades.
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