Is anyone aware of a free (as in beer) VM that will run on a wide range of windows hosts (XP/Vista/7/etc), that comes with a full management API (at least the ability to create, monitor, start/stop and snapshot guest VMs) ?
I looked at VMPlayer, but its VIX API appears to be crippled for that product.
I looked at Xen, and it comes with a management API, but Xen only runs on Linux hosts.
thanks
Steve
Have a look at VirtualBox I have ran that succesfully on both XP and 7, have not tried Vista
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On any cloud platform specifically can we run a windows VM and install a windows game ??
Will this work and will the data be lost after we disconnect the instance and is it feasible.
If you make sure to attach a persistent disk to the machine, then you can install games on it and they will stay there. Also make sure you get a machine with a GPU! You would probably have pretty bad experience using Remote Desktop though. Apart from that, this is entirely feasible.
I couldn´t find any information on the documentation of VMware about this topic. Any advise on where to find information on this is very appreciated.
VMware workstation, fusion and player are desktop productions that run on top of other operating systems like windows, linux and mac os. VMware ESX, ESXi run on bare metal directly. Since VMware Infrastructure 3 is built upon ESX and ESXi 3.X, it is ok for you to run workstation on top of VI3. But it should be pointed out that workstation running on VI3 won't support hardware virtualization even if your physical cpu ships with hardware virtualization solution. However, latest ESXi and even workstation support so called "nested virtualization" in non-production environment. Actually, I have a virtual ESXi 5 server that runs within my fusion 5.
Assuming that you mean that you want to run a virtualization solution (VMware Workstation) on top of another virtualization solution (VMware Infrastructure), although I'm not sure why you would want to do that instead of simply using a single virtualization solution (either Infrastructure or Workstation, depending on what your needs/goals are), I don't believe that it's blocked. To VMware Infrastructure, the guest OS that you're running Workstation on should just look like any other guest OS, albeit one that's probably using a lot of resources.
You might find someone else who is trying to accomplish the same thing in the Workstation community.
I'm going to develop mostly Django sites on a MacBook Pro and would like to use Ubuntu VMs for testing purposes.
Which product is better suited for this purpose?
Can I connect to the VM via TCP/IP (so I can have apache running on the VM and access it from Safari on my MBP)?
Thanks!
It should be possible using VMWARE FUSION. It has a good network management, and you should be able to access easily your vm via network.
I've successfully used both VirtualBox and VMWare Fusion for this. On both systems, you can set the guest up so that it has its own IP address, and connect to it via HTTP, SSH and even native file sharing, so you can mount the guest's drive as a network drive from the Mac, and vice versa. This makes it possible to do the editing on the Mac in eg Textmate, but run the server on the VM.
I can only tell you about my experiences with a Core2Quad Q6600 on VMWare Fusion 3.0. I have three boot partitions on this system (ahem yes it is a hackintosh running with the E-Fix USB).
So i can do performance measurements. I use it for sometimes very large compiler sessions. And the amazing fact was that Linux as a Guest runs without any measureable time difference on virtualised and native Linux. Windows7 on the other hand only runs with 40% on my machine and GUI is allmost non useable while the GNOME Desktop from latest Ubuntu still works fine.
Check this out. Virtual Box is free so there is nothing to loose.
I'm trying to write an application that connects to my company's wireless network automatically on windows XP.
I've found the Wireless LAN API but it requires me to have some hotfix installed on the machine, and you need to have sp2 or higher(There are machines with SP1, and I'm required to support any XP machine).
I've tried to find some samples about Wireless Zero Configuration on MSDN but with no luck, only samples I've found are for WinCE, I think Microsoft stopped supporting it. In addition I couldn't find where to download the dll and header file for working with the WZC.
There must be a way to do it and work on any service pack because I've found Zwlancfg by ENGL
Point out that any change you'll have to introduce to these old XP machines will be similar in magnitude to the SP2 update, except that (1) you don't have the insight into the network stack that Microsoft has, (2) you don't have the experience in Windows development that Microsoft collectively has and (3) you don't have the testing resources (including beta testers) that Microsoft has. So your change will be more risky and less stable than the SP2 update.
Couldn't you just setup the wireless password and tell XP to auto-join when it sees the network?
Maybe I'm missing something but it happens automatically, so I don't see why you need to code an app to do this.
I would encourage you to advocate for upgrading those XP machines at least to Service Pack 2 as it was a major upgrade in terms of functionality and security. It's also been at least 5 years since it was rolled out so I can't imagine you'd have compatibility issues with 3rd party software.
That being said.
Wireless for XP was seriously reworked with Service Pack 2 and the Wireless Network Policy was created that allows you to push out policy to all machines on your network via the Group Policy MMC.
You should try native wifi api but it will work with XP SP2
There is one WLANCONNECT() methos try that one
with that you will be able to connect to network with your program
we are setting up new QE testing server. I guess host OS will be win2008
Which vmware server to choose - 1.x or 2.x ?
A year ago I tried vmware 1 server with Win2008 and it did not work at all.
However, Vmware server 2 did not seem to have the handy vmware console
VMware Server Console\vmware.exe
(is the new vmware server2 still just web based?)
we have a lot of vmware 1 images, are these ok for v2?
Or is it just better to go with HyperV?
Hyper-V Server or ESXi would probably be the best performing and most trouble free options - ie virtualisation not really dependant on the host operating system (but still free).
You can use tools like Vmdk2Vhd to convert image files. Be aware that you should boot the image in its old format first and uninstall vmware tools and some drivers like specific disk controller drivers (as per the instructions of the tool) before you convert it.
Going the enterprise route the System Center Virtual Machine Manager can do this mostly automatically, but then it's not a free solution anymore :) This platform can of course also do physical to virtual migrations for you...
...but alas, you can prepare a physical machine the same way as before converting a vmware image and then use normal imaging tools to clone it into a virtual machine. Or you can use Vmware's free converter tool and then convert the resulting vmdk image to vhd :)
Vmware Server v2 can use v1 images. Windows Server 2008 is supported only in v2. v2 also includes the Virtual Infrastructure Client which you can use instead of the web access ( the client replaces the old console from v1). This is the same client that is used with ESX.
vmware 2.0 crashed regularly on one server I have - however, hasn't crashed since the recent 2.0.1 update (but its only been a week).
I have w2K8 running under vmware 1.0.9 - by selecting Vista (experimental) as the OS setting. However, it's not under any load yet.
I'd recommend ESXi over VMware Server (you can migrate the images) purely for performance reasons. Server 2008 and Vista both run abysmally under VMware Server from my experience. With ESXi and a decent hardware RAID setup, things can be a bit more bearable.