Edit: Much has changed since this has written, but it is still a great tool to run multiple operating systems on the same machine.
Originally posted May 2004 by IBM Systems Magazine
So you’ve heard Linux is the wave of the future and you want to try it out, but you don’t have a spare machine to load it on? You find yourself on the road with one laptop but would like to be able to run more than one operating system without dual booting? You’re already running Linux as your desktop OS and have the occasional need to run Windows applications? You do development work and need test machines to crash and burn? VMware may be the right solution for you.
At vmware.com, you can download the trial version and try a demo version of this software for 30 days or purchase the software from the Web site. There’s good documentation on the site to give you a more thorough overview of what you can expect when you run the software, and it goes into detail about the VMware server offerings. I’ll be focusing on the workstation version of VMware.
Once you’ve loaded the software, configured the amount of memory and disk you plan to allocate to your virtual machine, and decided which type of networking support you want, you’re ready to power it on. You treat VMware like a regular PC, and you can create as many virtual machines as you like. This way you can run RedHat, SUSE, Debian, Gentoo, Mandrake and Windows 95, 98, or XP all on the same computer at the same time. (Although I wouldn’t recommend trying to run them all at once, unless you have a huge amount of RAM.) Put the boot CD for the OS into the CD-ROM drive, press the virtual power button and your virtual machine will load your OS for you.
Once you’ve loaded and patched your OS, you can load the VMware tools package. From the Web site, “With the VMware Tools SVGA driver installed, Workstation supports significantly faster graphics performance. The VMware Tools package provides support required for shared folders and for drag and drop operations. Other tools in the package support synchronization of time in the guest operating system with time on the host, automatic grabbing and releasing of the mouse cursor, copying and pasting between guest and host, and improved mouse performance in some guest operating systems.”
I find that VMware really shines when I put it into full screen mode, and forget that I’m even running a guest operating system. I use the machine as if it were running Linux natively, until I find I need to do something in Windows, at which time I “Ctrl-Alt” back into my Windows session. Then, when I’m finished, I either power down the virtual machine (shutdown -h now) or just hit the suspend button to hibernate my virtual session so that I can pick it up where I left off the next time I want to use that OS.
Another nice feature is the ability to take the disk files (Linux.vmdk) that represent my current hard drive configuration and copy them to CD or send them over the network to a coworker. That coworker can then boot your exact machine configuration to help you look at bugs, see how your desktop is set up or see exactly how your OS is configured.
If your organization finds that it doesn’t have the funds to allocate to a room full of test machines, or you need to take multiple machines with you for a presentation or demo, VMware is a solution to consider. Why settle for running Linux on that old machine in the corner when you can run it at the same time you run your primary workstation?