I've just finished playing with my new installation of VMware 1.1 and my thoughts are this: It doesn't get any better than this. Installing VMware on your current operating system in order to take advantage of some of the software packages on another is a really nice thing and definitely worth the price.

First of all, let me tell you that VMware is _not_ an operating system in and of itself. It is a Virtual Machine. It creates a software simulation of a machine with known good attributes for the OS you plan to install on it. It has power on and power down buttons, so you can turn on and turn off your virtual machine. It is the same thing as having two computers reporting to the same monitor simultaneously. For this reason, you need to have a beefy machine. Don't install it with anything less than a PII350 with 128meg of ram. You can do it with less, but the virtual machine will be quite slow.

I like Linux a lot. I use it at work constantly for web-design and development. It has great tools and it is super-stable. But I also need some of the capabilities of Windows 9x. For instance, I need to be able to run Netware Administrator from time to time to (of all things!) administer our network. I add users, manage volume space, rconsole, add and fix network printing, usually all through Netware administrator and rconsole (Novell administrators and CNE's will know what I'm talking about here). These tools are _not available_ in Linux yet. Whenever I've had to use them, I'd have to reboot my nice Linux box and load windows. That wastes time.

The simulation is so complete that on our local area network using DHCP, (IP, obviously), IPX, UDP, etc, the virtual machine gets its own IP address, can see all the servers, can belong to windows workgroups, can print to windows printers, can print to network printers. Heck! I can even use Internet Explorer, Word, Excel, and Access on the vm. (Internet Explorer on a Linux box! HA! :)

A friend of mine suggested I try VMware. I gave it a go. There are still a few flaws in it, like the fact that my window manager (enlightenment) isn't supported very well, but on the whole it has been a real joy to use because I haven't had to reboot my machine since installing it. Once the Virtual Machine is loaded, I just minimize it and leave it on my desktop while I go on about my work. When I need it, I restore it, do what I need to do, and minimize it again. It's a beautiful thing.

This is a product I've been waiting for for a long time. There are also windows versions of it, so that you can run alternate OS's from windows. For example, you could run a windows 9x box inside a windows 2000 box, or vice versa, a linux box inside a windows 9x box, a windows NT box on a linux box. Depending on how much RAM you have and how much disk space, you could have several combinations of operating systems operating at the same time! The friend that suggested VMware to me said that at one of the trade shows (I forget which one, probably a Linux expo) VMware had a machine with a bunch of RAM, a bunch of disk space. It was running TWELVE DIFFERENT OPERATING SYSTEMS SIMULTANEOUSLY!

Because VMware only sets up a simulation of a machine on your machine, you'll also need the software to install the operating system on it. For example, I took out a windows 98 disk set and installed Windows 98 onto the virtual machine. I was very pleased when the installation went off without a hitch.

This package is ultra-cool. I wish I had better words to describe how grateful I am to VMware for creating this product. It is by far a better solution to multiboot computers with several partitions.



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