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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Invisible wrote:

> So anyway, it turns out we have a license for me to install VMware 
> Workstation on my PC. I have now done so.
> 
> OK, time to go check out the thing I actually came to test... ;-)

Wow... OK, Word 2007? Nothing like any other version of Word, ever. 
Like, the UI is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT now. Wow. o_O

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Invisible wrote:
> 
> Wow... OK, Word 2007? Nothing like any other version of Word, ever.
> Like, the UI is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT now. Wow. o_O

Yes. You don't read the news? Office 2007 is over 2 years old already...

-Aero

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>> Wow... OK, Word 2007? Nothing like any other version of Word, ever.
>> Like, the UI is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT now. Wow. o_O
> 
> Yes. You don't read the news? Office 2007 is over 2 years old already...

There's a place where a new version of Office is considered newsworthy?

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Invisible wrote:
> 
> There's a place where a new version of Office is considered newsworthy?

No, but the new UI is *krhm* was.

-Aero

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>> There's a place where a new version of Office is considered newsworthy?
> 
> No, but the new UI is *krhm* was.

Oh well, today is the first time I've ever had a chance to see Office 
2007. I guess now I understand why we're still not deploying it yet. ;-)

Presumably the idea is that it looks nice with Vista?

I wonder... Is 2007 still the latest version? What's the next release 
planned to be?

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> Wow... OK, Word 2007? Nothing like any other version of Word, ever. 
> Like, the UI is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT now. Wow. o_O

Dude, it's almost 2010!

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scott wrote:

> Dude, it's almost 2010!

...and?

Where I work, nobody is using 2007 yet. We're still using 2003.

(And it's not like I'm going to *pay money* to get a product I don't 
even use for my home PC.)

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Invisible wrote:

> Wow... OK, Word 2007? Nothing like any other version of Word, ever. 
> Like, the UI is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT now. Wow. o_O

Thing #1: OK, the default Word styles are *a lot* more fancy now.

Thing #2: Oh my ****ing God, changing styles ACTUALLY WORKS NOW!!! 8-O

Literally. Like, I wrote some stuff, flipped through a few of the "style 
sets", and the whole document instantly changed. AND IT ACTUALLY WORKED 
PROPERLY!

Possibly even more surprising is that the default style sets are... 
well, nice. As in, you might conceivably *use* them. (Usually the 
default styles are something you have to spent four weeks getting rid of 
and replacing with something worth having.)

An M$ product that actually gets better? Now there's something you don't 
very often see...

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Invisible wrote:
> - I like the "snapshot manager" thingy. That's really nice.

Be careful you don't turn on the snapshot and leave it for a long time. 
("long time" being "more than a day".)  It's writing all the changes to a 
new file, and when it's time to integrate that back into the main disk (if 
you want to), it takes a loooooong time if the snapshot is big.  Just don't 
leave it on by accident and work on stuff for a week, or you'll spend five 
hours putting the changes back in the disk.


This is also good info:

http://www.luisrocha.net/2008/11/splitting-your-vmware-virtual-disk-into.html

Helpful when it comes time to start backing up this sucker.

If you're running Linux (or any other OS that's easy to zero unused 
sectors), you can make disk backups really small by zeroing unused sectors, 
then copying the files into a compressed directory on Windows. (I suppose 
gzipping them under Linux would work just as well, for that matter.)


-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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