Posts Tagged ‘vmware’

Parallels 4 vs. VMware Fusion 2

Parallels recently released version 4 of their desktop virtualization software promising 50% better performance over the old version. I have used both VMware on Linux and Parallels on Mac for some time and decided to put them to test on the same system using VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop 4. My hardware was a Core 2 Duo MacBook at 1.83Ghz with 2GB of RAM. The machines were stored on an external hard drive attached via FireWire. My host OS was Mac OS X 10.5.5 and I used 32-bit Ubuntu 8.10 desktop as the test guest OS. I gave each machine access to both cores and 1GB of RAM. Most of my tests were very unscientific, but general observations about the usability of the machines in each software.

General Speed Observations

Since I wanted to start with fresh installs, the first step was to lay down an install of Ubuntu. I didn’t take any time measurements during the installer, but the installer in VMware was noticeably faster than Parallels. After the installation, I did a quick test of the boot speed of each. Ubuntu booted in 1 minute 28 seconds from the time I clicked the power button to when it was usable in Parallels and 1 minute 20 seconds in VMware. Really, there’s not a lot of difference there. VMware was also slightly slower when I opened OpenOffice 2.4. In Parallels, it took 11 seconds before it was usable compared to 9 seconds in VMware.

Driver Installation

The Parallels tools and VMware tools installations were significantly different. The Parallels tools installation was a very simple menu-driven installer from the terminal. It took just a couple of minutes to install and a quick reboot and we were up and running. The VMware tools installer was easy as well, but a bit longer with a few more options. After the first install, the mouse driver wouldn’t let the cursor leave the guest when it got to the edge of the machine window. I had to update the Ubuntu kernel to make it work. Upgrading the kernel was definitely recommended anyway, but I thought it would be worth noting.

File Transfer

I opened up SSH on my OS X box so Ubuntu detected it from the “Places” menu in Gnome as an SFTP server. I logged in and transferred an .iso file from my home directory over to the guest. The file was 637MB. I transferred the file in Parallels in 3 minutes 7 seconds and transferred it using VMware in 2 minutes 15 seconds. VMware wins again. VMware also allowed drag-and-drop files from OS X to the Ubuntu guest. Parallels didn’t offer support for that and neither offered drag-and-drop transfers going back. I transferred the .iso again using drag-and-drop to the VMware machine and it ran almost as fast as the SFTP transfer, transferring in 2 minutes 18 seconds.

Video Performance

No performance test involving Linux would be complete without glxgears. Surprisingly, the tests seemed to swing the opposite way and Parallels excelled at this test. VMware ran glxgears at a mere 155FPS, but the Parallels guest was able to run at 231FPS.

Summary

VMware seemed to be slightly faster in booting and launching applications, but Parallels had simplicity and video responsiveness on its side. The VMware tools were slightly more involved to install and had to be copied to the guest and extracted and Parallels tools slightly more simply. The VMware drivers also required me to update before automatically moving the cursor from the virtual guest to the host at the edge of the screen. However, VMware did allow the user to drag files from OS X into the virtual guest. Unfortunately, without running Windows you don’t get a lot of the features that VMware and Parallels offer, but support for Linux in both seems to be coming along nicely.

UPDATE:
Thanks to Pete from VMware who pointed out that there was a newer build of VMware available (the software did not prompt me for an update). I updated to the new version and Unity works great. Unity from the VMware platform was a definite plus since it allows applications from the guest to be in separate windows alongside the windows from the host OS. I did notice that video was quite a bit more choppy when in Unity view and glxgears showed around 127-128FPS rather than the 155 that I was seeing without it turned on, but the system was still usable. One thing that happened to me with the newer version of VMware tools was that when I clicked on any of the menus in Gnome and went down the list, it would consistently click the mouse for me. Eventually it stopped, but fairly annoying for just a few minutes.

With this new-found freedom, I decided to have a little bit of fun with Unity. I have Office 2007 installed using CrossOver so I quick downloaded a trial of Apple iWork to show off a little bit of diversity:

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (4) : Nov 16th, 2008

VMware Server 2 on Ubuntu 8.10

Apparently all the bugs with running VMware on Ubuntu 8.04 have either been worked out on the VMware side or the Ubuntu side with 8.10. I installed today using the Ubuntu 8.10 i386 desktop version with just a few prerequisites to install:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential

You’ll of course have to register with VMware.com to get a license key for VMware server and download the tarball. Once downloaded I untarred and unzipped:

tar zxvf VMware-server-2.0.0-122956.i386.tar.gz

Then run the installer:

cd vmware-server-distrib
sudo ./vmware-install.pl

During the installer I just took all of the defaults except I didn’t allow NAT’ing for my machines and I changed the default store location for my VM’s.

Once the installer was finished, I launched Firefox and navigated to: http://localhost:8222 (If you’re going across a network (especially across the web) you can also use the SSL server at: https://:8223).

Once logged in I created a virtual machine. To get to the console, I had to install the Firefox plugin for VMware and all was well.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (2) : Nov 12th, 2008

Ballmer Picks on Competitors Over.. Cost?

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently talked about Microsoft’s virtualization strategy for the next few years. In the video interview on ZDnet, Ballmer talks about democratizing virtualization.

He says that currently only 5% of servers are virtualized, and Microsoft has the key to making it more like 80%. Of course he took a shot at VMware, saying:

“If you want virtualization on 80 percent of servers instead of 5 percent of servers, you better not charge three times as much as the price of the server for the virtualization!”

Wait. What just happened here? I had to watch the video twice before I believed it. The CEO of Microsoft is going to give a lecture on over-priced software licenses? I almost fell off my chair when I heard him say that. Wow, I completely didn’t expect that. I expected some statement about how their software is better or something like that, but not that they were cheaper. Two things

1. Is Microsoft really going to bring up licensing costs as an argument for using their platform? Let’s say, for instance, that I want to upgrade my existing desktop from XP with Office 2003 to Vista Ultimate with Office 2007 Pro. Hardware upgrade costs aside, I can buy a Windows Vista Ultimate upgrade for $184.99 from Newegg. Then, I need to buy the Office 2007 upgrade. A professional version upgrade will cost me $289.99 on Newegg. That’s a total of $474.98. Now, let’s say I want to buy myself the upgrades for my Mac. I can spend $109.95 on the Leopard license from Newegg and iWork ’08 for $68.99. Yes, we can clearly see that Microsoft is definitely in a position to brag about licensing costs. Anyway, that’s another argument for another day.

2. Is it really free? According to the documentation, in order for the clustering to work you have to use Windows Server Enterprise or Datacenter edition on the bare metal. Well, being the curious soul that I am, I decided to find the cost. You can buy an OEM copy of Enterprise edition (the cheaper version) for the low cost of $2,699.99 from Newegg. Now we’re over halfway to the cost of ESX server and with ESX you don’t have the performance and management cost of running a full-blow Windows OS underneath everything else. Plus, I can’t live-migrate my virtual machines across physical machines like Xen or VMware. I’m going to leave alone the fact that you can’t access the hypervisor features using “unsupported” OS’s, like you know.. not Windows or SUSE Linux.

In true Microsoft style, they are late to the game and feature-poor, yet they try to push their weight around and make ridiculous claims. I didn’t start this blog to become a Microsoft-basher, but they make it so difficult not to. Sadly, I’m projecting that Hyper-V will become fairly popular simply because it comes bundled within the Windows server OS, just like Internet Explorer is one of the dominating browsers simply out of convenience.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (2) : Sep 27th, 2008

VMware Hits One Out of the Park.. Almost

I decided today to upgrade VMware server on my desktop to the new version 2.0 (after all I got the email that it was released over 24 hours ago!). I had used the beta and knew that the new version of the software was web-based and was very welcome to the change. One of my biggest annoyances with VMware was the lack of server console for the Mac. It’s fine that I have to run the server software on a Linux box, but I’d really like to be able to manage it straight from my machine (a Mac). I was thinking “Wow, this will be great.. Now that VMware is web-based it’ll be OS-agnostic and I can run it from anything.” Sadly, not so.

Once I had the server upgraded from a 1.0x release and running (which is nothing on my Ubuntu 8.04 system), I hopped over to my MacBook and went to the web interface. The management is great. It’s pretty similar in functionality to the old console, which I would expect. It definitely has some nice improvements and added features. Unfortunately, there’s no way to run the virtual machine console from a Mac. I realize this is a free product, but.. If VMware is trying to use portray itself as this ‘cloud computing’ enabler and pushing their new “DataCenter OS”, then why don’t we see a trend towards becoming OS agnostic from a management standpoint? Perhaps we are caught in the cross-fire between one of the world’s largest virtualization software maker and the only OS (to my knowledge) which explicitly prohibits virtualization of the OS in the EULA. The product is great (though the JavaScript seems a bit buggy), don’t get me wrong, but it’s the little things that make the difference.. like manageability.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Sep 25th, 2008

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