Eberhard Roloff wrote:
Kai Ponte wrote:
Just an update on my Vista laptop that I wanted to switch over to SUSE. One of the things I needed it to do was run our main application, written in .net but requiring many Windows-based controls.
In any case, I've now gotten VMWare to run perfectly in a 1400x1050 resolution with the application running just fine inside. I have no problems with speed or response.
I'd say this is the best of both worlds - a legacy OS like Windows running inside SUSE.
While this surely is impressive,
on a more general note, I doubt that it the best way to run windows.
That depends what you want to do with Windows. If one uses it for games, you might be right, as hardware requirements for them are quite stringent. But if one uses it in a business environment to run Windows applications that are not available on Linux (e.g. Visio or accounting software) -- then it's the perfect choice. And VMware is much more stable and reliable than all other alternatives.
After all it requires much more in regard to hardware resources than a native windows would need.
"much more"? No, definitively not. Performance is about 10% lower than native Windows, and that's not a problem on every processor above 2GHz. Even on my T21 with its 1.4GHz processor the performance is sufficient -- and doesn't really disturb the Linux part where a DBMS is running at the same time. And what would be the alternative? Linux? Sorry, all necessary apps are not there yet. Native Windows? Nah, that would mean that we would need to get two laptops to customer presentations and would need to set up a network between them -- it's so much easier just to fire up the VMware instance. It would also mean that every desk would need two computers on it -- what a waste of space and energy. And we didn't talk about snapshots yet, or about easy migration to other host computers for disaster recovery, or about standardized deployments because the (virtual) hardware is the same everywhere. These advantages are so relevant that some customers of us run *all* their systems in VMware, the Linux systems included.
You still cannot do anything that windows can do within an emulator.
Care to name some often occuring problems, beyond games that want to access the video hardware directly? I haven't seen such problems in thousands of VMware installations. (Granted, all of them in business settings, using ESX.)
AND, it is quite costly to buy a windows license, and additional windows software licenses for any linux computer that is standing around,
Sorry, but that argument doesn't cut it either in most cases: Large business have volume licenses anyhow. Home users get their Windows licenses when they buy a computer. Smaller business should be able to buy the licenses -- or they don't need the software. If the respective business area has not even enough revenues to buy the software that's needed to run it, it is not worth it and should be dropped; that's basic business planning. (At least that's my opinion as a CEO, who regularly does cost/revenue analysis in his own company.) Joachim -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Joachim Schrod Email: jschrod@acm.org Roedermark, Germany -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org