> My conclusion led me quicly to the investor relationship page in their > Web site, where I was informed that the company is privately held, so > I can't buy their shares. No wonder. The smart venture capitalists > dump on the public worthless shares in lame dotcoms, while they keep > to themselves the really good stuff.
Well, their biggest investment came from Dell Investment arm. Dell invested $20 million at VMWare. According to their managment (some of their managers are Israelies) they are in profit since the early beginning. > On the other hand, I am predicting bright future for them. After > people learn the VMware way to reduce the pain of administering MS-Windows > installations, they'll cease to directly install MS-Windows on their > PCs, choosing instead to install them in virtual machines running on more > stable (such as Linux) hosts. Hardly. 1. VMWare in most cases runs at 50% of your machine speed, with half of your memory. 2. VMWare PC emulation is incomplete (see panics with the latest .Net build beta, longhorn alpha, Red Hat 8.0 panics etc) - they add stuff as they release new versions (3.2 as I write this email doesn't fully support 8.0 and rawhide) > For this to happen, however, VMware will have to develop some drivers > to allow real-time DVD and video playing, and the like (not a serious > problem, if they can exploit the consumer market). Very problematic issues which envolves some heavy tuning for real time and fast performance (thats why you don't have full screen video for example). Add to that the fact that VMWare don't have so far any intention to do more hardware direct support (like their partial USB stuff - try to connect a webcam to a VMWare session or any async stuff hardware to see what I mean). > The benefits from switching from direct installation to virtual machine > based installation: > > 1. Windows XP activation mechanism won't prevent you from upgrading > your hardware, as the virtual machine (which is all that Windows XP > sees) stays the same. Wrong. Try to change the "hardware" enviroment in a legit Win XP copy for more thrn 6 times and you'll get the activation key request. > 2. You can save a checkpoint of your virtual machine at some other > place before trying dangerous software. If the software corrupts > your installation inside the virtual machine, you just copy back > from the checkpoint, instead of reinstalling everything. And you can do it with XP (system restore to a previous date/time) or simply save your registry. Of course, saving a snapshot of your virtual disk is a great plus ;) > 3. Disinfecting a virus-infected PC is matter of: - Copying your > important (and uninfected) files outside to Linux filesystem > (using Samba). - Copying back the virtual machine files from backup copy. > - After rebooting, copy back your files from the Linux filesystem. You can also boot your machine into a "Live" Linux distribution, save your files, and restore your windows session.. > 4. If you sandbox a virtual machine (no access to your Linux > filesystem), you can run it without antivirus, and since VMware > tries not to slowdown your system too much, you gain back large part > of the computer's performance. It slows down lots of times. Ever tried to run Red Hat 8.0 graphical desktop inside vmware? You'll see how slow it is if you're using VMWare display instead of forwarding X sessions.. > 5. For busy professionals, who really need stable PCs, the cost of VMware > > (about $300 per license) is recouped by not having to twice put the > PC out of service for 1/2 day each time, for OS+applications reinstallation. It got it place, but I hardly see anyone starting to use VMWare and their Windows as guest. The VMware people are investing their efforts on VMWare ESX and GSX. I tested their VMWare ESX and it's a really great. Install it on a very high end server (4+ processors, 16GB RAM with plenty of disk space) and install to your client their KVM clients - and it works like a charm. You'll get a Red Hat 6.2 console on the server and the scripting stuff to do tasks between VM's is really amazing (do some scripts, ask the script to reboot some vm to do something, switch live to another vm with another OS - really cool stuff) but it costs few thousand dollars. The GSX version is for something like 4 guest OS's running in 1 machine (you need 2+ processors, 2GB RAM etc)... On the other hand I do see some bright future to ... wine. I've been talking on the phone with Jeremy White (CEO of CodeWeavers) and they'll publish soon their road-map. Their current work shows some really cool progress, with multiple windows versions emulation (to run several versions of the same app without chocking your machine), and lots of applications supported (office stuff, multimedia stuff soon (so video will be shown way better), and other stuff.. don't take my word, look at it: http://users.theshell.com/~vinn/ss/preview.html Thanks, Hetz ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
