My only experience of VM technology so far has been with a freeware 
program called QEMU. (I also briefly touched BOCHS, but never really 
used it much.)

QEMU has the nice feature that it's, like, 1.5 MB or something, and it 
doesn't need to be "installed"; you just run it. That means you can put 
a VM image and a copy of QEMU onto a USB stick, and take it anywhere and 
run it on any PC. And when you're gone, there will be no evidence that 
you were ever there. You can run Windows, Linux, MS-DOS, whatever.

Only trouble is, it runs slower than treacle. But hey, you're running a 
PC emulator ON A PC! What do you expect?

So anyway, it turns out we have a license for me to install VMware 
Workstation on my PC. I have now done so. Observations:

- OK, wow. This sucker is a 0.5GB download?! o_O

- Oh man, this is some serious product. It's installing custom device 
drivers all over the place. Custom network driver (presumably for 
connecting the VM to the Real World?), custom USB driver (so, what, you 
can use physical USB devices from inside the virtual machine?), custom 
video driver (uh, why...?) This is gonna be good...

- OK, this thing has some pretty sweet management capabilities. With 
QEMU, you run the image tool to create an empty HD image, and then you 
run QEMU.EXE with half a billion switches to tell it where the disk 
images are and what hardware to emulate. (If you're sensible, you will 
put this in a batch file!) Once you've got a few VMs and several 
snapshots, good luck keeping track of all your files! o_O VMware seems 
to make all this way, way easier.

- My God, installing Windows on a VM is *faster* than installing it on a 
physical PC?! How is this possible?? O_O (OK, actually, installing from 
the Windows CD is about the same speed. But installing from an ISO image 
of the CD is much faster. I guess my fileserver's RAID array can serve 
data faster than a cheap optical drive, eh?)

- Heh, interesting. It askes for a bunch of settings to autoconfigure 
Windows, and then doesn't use them anyway. That's cute.

- I can't believe how fast the VM runs, or how little system resources 
it requires. I've allowed 0.5GB of RAM to it, and yet it seems to be 
using less RAM than Outlook. (Outlook eats 30MB, VMware takes only 
27MB.) While the VM isn't doing anything, it takes no CPU power. In 
fact, most of the time it seemingly takes no CPU power. The only thing 
it really does hammar is the HD, which makes the rest of the computer 
seem kinda sluggish at times...

- Nice how it shows you CD, HD and network activity on the side on the 
window. If only there was a CPU indicator...

- I like the "snapshot manager" thingy. That's really nice.

- Pity the VMware window insists on constantly resizing itself, even 
when I tell it not to. Ooo, but in fullscreen mode, Windows changes its 
resolution to match my screen. (Presumably due to the VMware Tools that 
automatically installed itself.) I wonder if there's some way to make 
the activity indicators still appear in fullscreen mode?

OK, time to go check out the thing I actually came to test... ;-)

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