17 Feb
2010
17 Feb
'10
9:55 a.m.
At 11:38 AM 2/17/2010, Ray Arachelian wrote:
VMWare Player is free. I've played with it once,
it was ok, but too limited.
Yes, I confused Player and Workstation.
Everything worked just fine - network, USB, sound,
video. No issues
other than the file format was different,
There's also the VMware Converter, which aids in converting physical
devices to virtual appliances. It'll accept machine images in many
formats, and for conversion of Windows and Linux, there's a tool that'll
do it while "live".
Different versions of VMWare use different file
formats for
their VMs. If you create a VM in VMWare Workstation, it probably won't
work under VMWare Server 1.0, though it probably will work under VMWare
Fusion.
And Converter can translate between those, too.
Oh, that, and some guest OS's are commercial,
therefore protected by
copyright, therefore, it wouldn't be legal to distribute. No such
issues with Linux VMs for example (assuming you stick to the free ones,
and not something like RHEL.)
But for emulators that work under FreeDOS or Linux, it would be a way
to distribute a pre-packaged, ready-to-go appliance file that would
let you tinker with an emulator without spending the time to learn
how to configure it (which is ancillary to the objective, no?).
Yes, it wouldn't be legal to redistribute an emulator that
was Windows-based, unless of course in ran under WINE under Linux.
For the Windows-based emulators, I suspect we'll soon have a file format
that bundles all of an application and its data into a redistributable
single-file format. You can see glimpses of this already in the
enterprise tools that let you run an app this way, without actually
installing it into your registry and hard drive. Maybe it'll be a
way from all this Windows ugliness.
As for real devices connecting to emulators and VMs, it is true
that the workstation environments let you connect to that machine's
USB or other devices, but ESXi doesn't even talk to the USB on the
host computer (although it's a bug). Instead, people are using
USB to Ethernet adapters that speak TCP/IP with a driver running
inside the VM.
Good commentary overall, Ray.
- John