Talk:VMware

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Opinionated

As per the quote:

I found VMware emulates very accurate real hardware behaviors, at good speed (especially with Intel-VT or AMD-V)

This has more promotional value than factual value. Define "good speed" - is it worse or better than QEmu, worse or better than VirtualPC, worse or better than VirtualBox? Similarly define "very accurate emulation" - VMWare used to have rather poor graphics abilities, enough to put it below Bochs and Qemu on that matter (which have a nice collection of issues of themselves), and thus way beyond VirtualPC which so far proved to be the most accurate in that area. Is all that still the case? I think some facts should be added, or alternatively, these phrases be removed. - Combuster 16:02, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

As far as facts go, I ran my VGA test suite on VMWare and compared the results:
  1. VMWare doesn't support all resolutions
  2. VMWare has very poor accuracy, only enough to support standard VGA modes. In quality it barely breaks even with Bochs, and is way behind VirtualPC
  3. VMWare emulates the VGA extremely slow, far worse than my default Bochs configuration. Extrapolated, Bochs would have to be set to emulate a ~900KHz processor in order to match VMWare on my Athlon64 machine (and yes, the units are correct!).
Based on the above and the lack of replies, I will now remove the propaganda. - Combuster 23:31, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

VMWare on 64-bit windows

I removed this line:

Note: On 64-bit Windows systems using AMD processors, a patch is required for virtual machines to function correctly. The patch can be downloaded from Microsoft

I would like it to be put back in the article but I would like some clarifications first. First it should mention AMD-V. Secondly, will VMWare function incorrectly? or just not use hardware-assisted virtualization? If incorrectly I'm curious to how so? -Jhawthorn 03:26, 17 March 2007 (CDT)

By "function incorrectly," I meant the program will crash when a virtual machine is started (oddly enough, this only happens about half the time). VMWare isn't using machine-assisted virtualization without this patch, but my understanding is that it relies on it for some of its functionality on the AMD64 platform. After installing the patch, I no longer had stability issues, and observed an enormous performance boost. --speal 03:52, 20 March 2007 (CDT)

I haven't had a chance to write up a detailed description of the problem, but I stumbled onto an article at pagetable.com. It seems to describe the exact issue I had, and explains why I was able to run several other hobby OSes under vmware without any performance or stability issues. --speal

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