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Re: [Xen-users] VMWARE Player alternative

Thanks for the info! I demo'd qemu and while it works o.k, I don't think better then VMplayer. It got someways to go - I'll keep my eye on it!

It has some pretty nifty features, including compatibility with (single file) VMware virtual disks and (I think) Virtual PC virtual disks, as well as it's own copy on write format (so you can snapshot the disk state at various points).

The main disadvantage is probably speed, but with the current (in beta) accelerator module there is a substantial speedup - did you try this?

The other disadvantage is the GUI - it's not very friendly. There are some wrappers for starting QEmu from a GUI but basically it's waiting for somebody industrious to create a proper GTK or QT GUI with VMware Player type functionality.

Though it would be nice for XEN team to come up with a solution like that of VMware Player

It would indeed. Unfortunately Xen needs to be installed and booted into before you can run Xen domains. Once Xen becomes more pervasive (lots of distros are starting to ship it) it'll probably make sense to have a player / workstation style GUI for people who are running Xen on a single system. This could be very nice - especially once Vanderpool / Pacifica hardware becomes commonplace.

There are lots of little tricks you can do to make the tools nice. Scrapbook for UML allows you to click on a hyperlink to a running UML virtual machine and have that VM appear with a virtual display on your computer. This can be used (for instance) to demo software - click a link on the vendor's homepage and get a virtual machine with the product up and running. If you don't like it, just ditch that VM. If you do, then install the software properly. Pretty neat, and there are lots of possibilities too.

Cheers,
mark



M.A. Williamson wrote:
QEmu (http://www.qemu.org)

Or if you're on a PPC or Intel Mac, take a look at Q: http://www.kberg.ch/q/

(Q is basically a release of QEmu that's had a nifty Mac GUI put on it)

QEmu has an optional binary-only accelerator module that will boost the speed significantly but is closed-source (for now). There's an open source accelerator for Qemu called QVM86 but it's less advanced.

Cheers,
Mark

On Apr 20 2006, Joe Lee wrote:

Thought I post this question here: Is there an open source alternative to VMware Player. I know it's a free product BUT would like to know if there is any known other open source alternatives. Thanks in advance for your comments!

Joe

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