On Friday 27 June 2008 14:14:02 Bogdan Cristea wrote:
I use VMWare Workstation for Linux with guest OS openSuSe 11.0. The license for VMWare is free.
I think you mean VMware Server (free download)? There is also VMware Player (free download) which can run VMs created in VMware Workstation (price to be paid after 30 day eval) and VMware Server. There is also Xen virtualisation in openSUSE, which can para-virtualise operating systems whose kernel's have been modified with Xen in mind (most recent Linuxes but _not_ Windows). When combined with Intel-VT and AMD-V processors you can also virtualise non-modified operating systems (older Linuxes and Windows). openSUSE 11.0 also ships with KVM virtualisation which again takes advantage of Intel-VT or AMD-V processors and allows you to virtualise a wide range of operating systems. This is very similar to qemu for virtualisation but better performing. Another option is VirtualBox (now owned by Sun) which also allows virtualisation of a wide range of operating systems. This is also freely available and there is an open source version. (Although free to download, there is no open source VMware) For the original poster the choice of virtualisation technology to use depends upon the usage expected. If it's server virtualisation that is required and it's going to be recent Linux operating systems, then I'd suggest Xen is the stand-out choice. Para-virtualisation should provide the closest to native performance of all the available choices. If Windows or older Linux operating systems are required then my personal preference would be VMware Server/Player. VMware for me has provided the best performance when running Windows and requiring reasonable graphics performance. It's also a nice introduction to VMware in case you ever need to move up to ESX (I know ESX is very different, but the basic concepts remain the same). Xen and KVM could be regarded as the least mature (and perhaps least user friendly tools), but they are being developed at a fast rate and it's certainly an interesting area. Jon -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org