Comments on: Virtual PC and VMWare

By: wOnDeRgEeKbOy

wOnDeRgEeKbOy — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 00:47:53 +0000

I’ve been a long time VMware user. I run all flavors here, Workstation, GSX, and ESX. I’ve also ran VPC and VS2005 betas…I still find that VMware outperforms VPC in every way! Configuration, management, stability, usability, and more! VPC is most likely a few years behind VMware but I’m sure the Microsoft folks will catch up soon!

By: James

James — Fri, 28 May 2004 08:52:38 +0000

Personaly after using them bolth I have to say VMWare smokes Virtual PC.

Ive used bolth of them on Windows, VM Ware on Linux and Virtual PC on MacOS.

VMWare is more configurable, its faster, and more stable. Virtual PC, has better intragration (on windows) and *some what* better emulated hardware like the sound card (but its a virtual machiene so who cares about sound?)

I wish VMWare would port over to Macintosh.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Mon, 23 Feb 2004 21:29:59 +0000

It’s too bad you paid for it twice. IMHO, VMWare is cool enough (read: more features) I tried it first and never gave Virtual PC 2004 a thought.

By: Bob Flanders

Bob Flanders — Wed, 05 Nov 2003 12:00:33 +0000

I’ve been using VMWare since just after the 2000 PDC, and thought that was the coolest thing. (I used to be a VM/370 systems programmer, so seeing that product was just so cool…)

Anyway, I received some article about Virtual PC from a newslist and ran across this site when I did a search for Virtual PC.

I thought you’d be interested that you were correct. MS will ship it on MSDN (see http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/virtualpc/evaluation/faq.asp).

Take care.

By: edan

edan — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 00:23:06 +0000

I've been using VMWare 4.0.0 for about 6 months now, upgrading from 3.2 which ran great previously. RedHat 7.2 has run flawless within it, and it only goes down when I bring it down. I also have Solaris 10 beta 40 running it now, and while it is unsupported (and the X server doesn't work), it's been running fine.

I can FTP from the RedHat VM at about 5MB/sec pretty consistently, so I don't think the previous poster's comment about "locked @ 10 mbps" is univeral. I just tried the Solaris 10 VM and it FTP'd to the same server at 9 and 10MB/s, so it really seems to not apply for me :-)

I have no direct experience with Virtual PC, but a friend said VMWare's support for physical disks allowed him to run MS Exchange Clusters within VMWare, and he claimed this was not possible with VirtualPC at this time.

Hope this helps.

By: terry (the Roadhog)

terry (the Roadhog) — Wed, 18 Jun 2003 15:57:42 +0000

--> Lior
I was using Vmware 4 for a little bit after it came out and I also experienced glitches. Namely with the floppy drive refusing to map and cdrom lockups as well. I actually regressed back to my previous VM version (gsx server 2.5) with no problems. But my key issue with VMW 4 is that the network speed for the VM's seemed to be locked @ 10 mbps. Vmware gsx 2.5 allows you to use either a vmnet or vmlance driver (one being 10 and the other being 100). I think vmware 4.x may solve some of these "beta" issues as you so correctly dubbed them.

In other issues, I just recently started toying with Virtual PC 5 and i am REALLY impressed. It overall seems much more responsive than vmware and while it doesnt have the "commercial look and feel" that vmware seems to have locked down, it seems to be a much more stable and responsive virtual platform. I had shayed away from it in the past due to reports of it performing much poorer than vmware but I was really surprised when i tried the latest version for myself. Is there anyone else using/used virtual PC 5 seeing significant improvement over Vmware? (4 or 2.5 GSX would probably be the fairest comparison) I am considering rebuilding all my images in VPC soon but i wanted to get some other input first.

Thanks!

By: Lior

Lior — Sat, 14 Jun 2003 06:42:13 +0000

I am one of the first VMWare users ever. I was generally satisfied with their products and version 3.2 was an excellent one. However, version 4 seems to have lost the “rock solid” stability that characterized version 3 (traded for more features). I encountered many “minor” stability issues, e.g. the drag-and-drop file transfer between the host and the guest gets stuck, the CD door is sometimes locked after leaving VMWare and can only be released with a full reboot, sometimes pausing/resuming the VM fixes “freezes” in the guest run, etc.

Also, the product really looks like an unfinished beta, e.g. when creating a monolithic disk a popup saying multiple 2GB files will be created (nobody went through this process seriously in testing, otherwise it would be caught immediately – it is simply confusing the user).

I wondered if others experienced similar degradation is stability when moving from version 3 to 4.

By: Saul T.

Saul T. — Fri, 30 May 2003 17:23:19 +0000

MS acquired Connectix not for the VirtualPC product itself but for the underlying virtual machine implementation. Do a google search for microsoft vm flaw and you’ll see why they were in the market.

By: Greg Reinacker

Greg Reinacker — Fri, 09 May 2003 20:26:34 +0000

Well, since MS acquired Virtual PC from Connectix, I would think there’s a good chance Virtual PC will show up in MSDN subscriptions. This is purely speculation, however…

By: Rob

Rob — Fri, 09 May 2003 15:57:09 +0000

What’s this about possibly being bundled with MSDN? I can’t seem to find any other info on that idea…