Well, my 6-week (!) trial of the most excellent Virtual PC from Connectix has finally run out. This product has been instrumental in my everyday life since I first tried it, mostly for testing NewsGator on multiple OS’s, configurations, and Outlook versions. I’ve got 5 or 6 images that I use regularly, and 5 or 6 more that I test on before shipping a release.
It’s $229 to purchase, which I don’t have a problem with. My question is, is there anything cool in VMWare that I’m missing? VPC seems to be working fine, albeit hanging my machine every now and then. I could try out VMWare, but it’s going to be a huge investment in time to build the images I need. So basically, VMWare is going to have to do something much better or faster than VPC for it to be worth it to spend the time to switch.
What kills me is this thing is probably going to ship in MSDN in a few months, so I will have paid for it twice. But on the other hand, I can’t wait a couple of months. Heh.
Comments, anyone? Is VMWare cool enough to switch?
My understanding was that the performance of Virtual PC was MUCH lower than that of VMware. I’ve used and loved VMware for a long time, and never had it crash my PC. It’s always been rock solid.
I’ve used VirtualPC and VMware at various times and have found VirtualPC to be the better of the two. Performance of VirtualPC < 5.0 was below VMware, but they fixed that with 5.0 (they changed the emulated hardware). I've never had VMware or VirtualPC crash, so I can't comment on stability!
Well, I’d like to try VMWare, but honestly I don’t have time to recreate a bunch of images. So I went ahead and bought Virtual PC. Thanks for your comments guys!
I haven’t used VirtualPC, but I think the network support in VMWare is more flexible. For example, VMWare will let you set up a test network of several virtual machines with bridging and routing between the machines.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t bet against the product that MS just bought.
I concur with the “VMW is faster” statement. I was using VMW3 and VPC5 to program in .NET and the speed diff was very noticable. This was on a dual proc PIII 933 with 1G of RAM.
If you need to do multiple virtual boxes with networking between them VMW is much more robust in that regard. I do lots of “virgin” .NET web service testing.
You’re saying that VPC is hanging your machine now and then. That’s certainly not supposed to happen. VMWare also had quite a few stability issues in its infancy, but they’re definitely gone. My general feeling is that VMWare is rock solid, and can even run servers without any issues. The best thing, though, is accessing a virtual Windows server across Terminal Services. That way, the UI is super-fast and indistinguishable from a real machine. It’s certainly a better option than running the virtual machine through the VMWare window itself.
My own experience is quite equal with both VPC and VMW, and I came here to see other people’s experiences… But I didn’t get anything clear! if migratin is the only problem, I’ll give you and advice: Use some mirroring software, as Norton Ghost, Imagecast… I did so, transfered the image through the virtual LAN, and restored it back! does anyone know a freeware cloner?
Since google loves this post, I should clear up the hanging thing. I don’t know for sure that Virtual PC is the culprit – I have a feeling I might have a questionable driver on my system; I just don’t know which one. And also since installing the retail version of VPC, I haven’t had the problem.
This is very late, since I just found the page. I’m currently pursuing VPC, but a big difference is that VMWare supports USB devices directly, and VPC does not (although you can access things like removable drives via the shared folders feature, and USB keyboards and mice are supported with standard calls).
What’s this about possibly being bundled with MSDN? I can’t seem to find any other info on that idea…
Well, since MS acquired Virtual PC from Connectix, I would think there’s a good chance Virtual PC will show up in MSDN subscriptions. This is purely speculation, however…
MS acquired Connectix not for the VirtualPC product itself but for the underlying virtual machine implementation. Do a google search for microsoft vm flaw and you’ll see why they were in the market.
I am one of the first VMWare users ever. I was generally satisfied with their products and version 3.2 was an excellent one. However, version 4 seems to have lost the “rock solid” stability that characterized version 3 (traded for more features). I encountered many “minor” stability issues, e.g. the drag-and-drop file transfer between the host and the guest gets stuck, the CD door is sometimes locked after leaving VMWare and can only be released with a full reboot, sometimes pausing/resuming the VM fixes “freezes” in the guest run, etc.
Also, the product really looks like an unfinished beta, e.g. when creating a monolithic disk a popup saying multiple 2GB files will be created (nobody went through this process seriously in testing, otherwise it would be caught immediately – it is simply confusing the user).
I wondered if others experienced similar degradation is stability when moving from version 3 to 4.
–> Lior
I was using Vmware 4 for a little bit after it came out and I also experienced glitches. Namely with the floppy drive refusing to map and cdrom lockups as well. I actually regressed back to my previous VM version (gsx server 2.5) with no problems. But my key issue with VMW 4 is that the network speed for the VM’s seemed to be locked @ 10 mbps. Vmware gsx 2.5 allows you to use either a vmnet or vmlance driver (one being 10 and the other being 100). I think vmware 4.x may solve some of these “beta” issues as you so correctly dubbed them.
In other issues, I just recently started toying with Virtual PC 5 and i am REALLY impressed. It overall seems much more responsive than vmware and while it doesnt have the “commercial look and feel” that vmware seems to have locked down, it seems to be a much more stable and responsive virtual platform. I had shayed away from it in the past due to reports of it performing much poorer than vmware but I was really surprised when i tried the latest version for myself. Is there anyone else using/used virtual PC 5 seeing significant improvement over Vmware? (4 or 2.5 GSX would probably be the fairest comparison) I am considering rebuilding all my images in VPC soon but i wanted to get some other input first.
Thanks!
I’ve been using VMWare 4.0.0 for about 6 months now, upgrading from 3.2 which ran great previously. RedHat 7.2 has run flawless within it, and it only goes down when I bring it down. I also have Solaris 10 beta 40 running it now, and while it is unsupported (and the X server doesn’t work), it’s been running fine.
I can FTP from the RedHat VM at about 5MB/sec pretty consistently, so I don’t think the previous poster’s comment about “locked @ 10 mbps” is univeral. I just tried the Solaris 10 VM and it FTP’d to the same server at 9 and 10MB/s, so it really seems to not apply for me :-)
I have no direct experience with Virtual PC, but a friend said VMWare’s support for physical disks allowed him to run MS Exchange Clusters within VMWare, and he claimed this was not possible with VirtualPC at this time.
Hope this helps.
I’ve been using VMWare since just after the 2000 PDC, and thought that was the coolest thing. (I used to be a VM/370 systems programmer, so seeing that product was just so cool…)
Anyway, I received some article about Virtual PC from a newslist and ran across this site when I did a search for Virtual PC.
I thought you’d be interested that you were correct. MS will ship it on MSDN (see http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/virtualpc/evaluation/faq.asp).
Take care.
It’s too bad you paid for it twice. IMHO, VMWare is cool enough (read: more features) I tried it first and never gave Virtual PC 2004 a thought.
Personaly after using them bolth I have to say VMWare smokes Virtual PC.
Ive used bolth of them on Windows, VM Ware on Linux and Virtual PC on MacOS.
VMWare is more configurable, its faster, and more stable. Virtual PC, has better intragration (on windows) and *some what* better emulated hardware like the sound card (but its a virtual machiene so who cares about sound?)
I wish VMWare would port over to Macintosh.
I’ve been a long time VMware user. I run all flavors here, Workstation, GSX, and ESX. I’ve also ran VPC and VS2005 betas…I still find that VMware outperforms VPC in every way! Configuration, management, stability, usability, and more! VPC is most likely a few years behind VMware but I’m sure the Microsoft folks will catch up soon!