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As for VMWare, it's gorgeous. I use the software for my college program. They've actually modified all the program's so that instead of multiple partitions, they're all Windows boxes with virutal machines. It also means we don't need an actual lab and a ghost server to do our various classes, we can use any room and run VMs.
As for the speed issue, that can vary. I've ran VMs on everything from a P3 800 and up. on the P3, it would be slow at times but as long as you had enough RAM you were ok. The 800 had 512MB. For my program that min. req. is 512MB RAM and a 1.1GHz cpu. The rentals from the college have celeron processors and they can handle one VM no problem, and two VMs with a slight slow down. I use a Celeron 2.2Ghz w/ 512MB of RAM and have no problem running 2 and occasionally 3 VMs, as long as I'm not doing anything too intensive. This system I'm on right now is an AMD XP 2500+ w/ 768MB of DDR. I'm curring emerging some software on a gentoo VM. I have 4 consoles running, each compiling apps (everything from kde to php to apache to ethereal and so on). That is a pretty heavy burden in and of itself. When you add my background apps (ICQ, MSN, AIM, Skype, mIRC, AVG, etc...) it's doing it's fair deal of work. My roommate and I Just finished watching American Wedding (while the VM was running in the background) and it didn't hinder the movie at all, even though it's compiling four seperate programs.
The only thing to be careful of is VMWare 4. We've had many students who chose to go with VMWare 4 (The college supports and provides VMWare 3) and there have been issues with Virtual DHCP Servers running. They seem to forget they're supposed to broadcast to the virtual machines and start accepting DHCP requests that are bound for the server yet heard by the NIC of the host machine. This caused some major problems, around 30-40% of the college had difficulty getting online while these rogue machines were tracked down and finally located.
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It's not for dual booting.
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VMware Workstation runs multiple operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Novell NetWare, simultaneously on a single PC in fully networked.
Let's say u want to test new hardware ..so you want to test if it is compatible with more then one OS ..so you install a guest operating system and see if it work on that one ... log onto Linux on the same machine and test it ...log onto Novell and test it there ..it's easier to test software and hardware with a few machines
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VMware Workstation gives students the freedom to experiment with new applications or tools. With undoable disks, they can try "what if" scenarios without the worry of trashing the test system or having to rebuild it - virtual machines can be restored with a mouse click. Instructors/corporate trainers can create a library of pre-configured training environments, easily distribute them to students, and can quickly restore machines to a clean state for their next class. Sales and marketing professionals can distribute demo software without installation or compatibility problems and demo complex or multi-tier applications on a single laptop.
Also you do NOT need to partition your hard drive . VMware uses your computers file system and creates files that map on a virtual machines disk drives. And you do NOT need to boot ..you can change systems with mouse clicks.