Duffbert's Random Musings

1 - You are right, VMWare is the best! I prefer it over Virtual PC even though MS gave me that for free. Boot time of Windows VMs is better with VMware than Virtual PC.

I recently upgraded to a more modern laptop, ie retired my trusty 5 year old Thinkpad, worried that I would leave a file or miss an important build script or something in the move I came up with the perfect solution, I took a drive image of the whle thinkpad and created a VMWare out of it, now whenever I need to go check something on my old machine I just boot up the VMWare image.

I do the same as Andrew, whenever I am doing ST customizations for a client, or testing a funky a setup a customer may have VMware is get for that.

A very cool yet useful product.

2 - Tom, VMWARE is really a great thing. I keep a Linux and a Win2k VM installed in a 2gb virtual drive archived. Whenever I need a new VM for something, I just make a new instance copy from that and I'm good to go. Also, because the virtual hardware doesn't change, I keep a copy of these on my external drive in my briefcase. I also keep ISO copies of the OS install cd's handy.

Now, when I speak, I use VM's to build the demo environments. That way they don't mess with the configurations on my own pc. Also, I burn a copy of the read to go demo to a DVD along with a copy of VMWARE so that if something happens to my laptop, I can be up and running on someone else's or a new one in a few minutes.

Lastly, for each of my clients that needs me to use their VPN, I create a customized VM which is configured for that specific network. No more juggling 5 different vpn packages in one network stack.

3 - I also am impressed with VMWare. I am running the VMWare Version 5 Beta and it is orders of magnitude better than M$ Virtual PC. I have run two Domino R7 beta servers with both VMWare and Virtual PC. One is WinXP and the other Suse Linux 9.2. My host machine is a Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop with only 512MB memory.

With M$ VPC, I could never get clock synchronization to work with the Linux machine and when I tried upgrading it to VPC service pack 1, clock problems with Linux went out of control (way too fast). No help on this from M$, except they recommended going into your bios settings and disabling all the power-saving/speed-step settings (no way I was going to do that to my trusty Dell).

With VMWare, clock sync works perfectly with both WinXP and Linux. Since I'm memory starved, and I use my virtual Domino servers for testing/learning purposes only, I usually just "suspend" the VPC's and "resume" them later when needed. Suspend/resume is much faster than re-booting a vpc. Since clock sync works, both my Domino servers wake-up and adjust to the new time/date and start running.

Working with virtual networks is much easier with VMWare than it was with M$ Virtual PC. With VMWare, I can have a private network going between my Domino Servers and my host machine with my Notes client and still have all of them sharing my Internet connection. Very nice!! I could never get this combo working with M$ VPC and the M$ Loopback adapter.

VMWare comes with a VPC "importer". It worked fine importing my old M$ VPC WinXP, but it couldn't access my old VPC Linux virtual drive. No big deal, I just created a new VMWare vpc and re-installed Linux and Domino 7 on it.

VMWare also comes with a cool utility called "DiskMount". With DiskMount, you can map a drive on your host machine to a virtual drive without loading VMWare or the virtual machine. Very nice for moving files back-and-forth.

VMWare also supports "shared folders" between host and virtual machine and it works with both WinXP and Linux. M$ VPC did not support shared folders with Linux.

Although my copy of M$ VPC was "free" as is my current VMWare V5 beta copy, I will willingly pay for VMWare V5 when released.

4 - Sorry people... I have solved thanx to some assistence provided by my "knowledgeble" mate

5 - Does anyone know where to find VM Images pre-created with older OS's - such as DOS or OS/2?

6 - I have just installed VM 5 on my FC3 and installed win Xp so to enbable me to do some C# development but I have no clue as to how to transfer some files quickly from FC3 to the VM/Xp

Any ideas?
Many thanx