Qemu vs. VMWare-workstation

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TerranAce007 · Post by **TerranAce007** » Mon Sep 26, 2005 3:37 pm

I have been messing with qemu on my laptop, and I was just reading about VMware-workstation. I had been under the impression that VMWare was an expensive commericial program, and that qemu was the best free alternative. Seeing now that there are VMware ebuilds in portage also, I am wondering what the differences are as far as capabilities between the two (Don't have my laptop at the moment to emerge it...). Right now I dual boot with Gentoo and XP home, but since my hard drive is only 60gb, I have been experimenting with qemu to see if I can get a working XP Home guest system with decent performance to get rid of my XP partition. I just installed a guest Fedora Core 4 system last night to test out qemu, and it is really slow. Anyone have any enlightening experiences they can share about either of these emulators?

andrew_j_w · Post by **andrew_j_w** » Mon Sep 26, 2005 4:24 pm

Make sure you're using the kqemu kernal module, that provides a great speed boost. You need to use the kqemu use flag when compiling and then run qemu-system-x86_64 instead of qemu to run it.

The biggest difference from a user perspective is that vmware provide special drivers to install in your guest system which greatly improves the graphics/sound performance over qemu.

I use qemu+kqemu and it works fine for simple Windows work on 2000, I haven't tried XP though.

HTH,
Andrew

GJtje · Post by **GJtje** » Mon Sep 26, 2005 11:39 pm

VMware aint free, portage can install it for you but you will need to enter a valid license before you can make any guests.

TerranAce007 · Post by **TerranAce007** » Tue Sep 27, 2005 12:28 am

yes, I just discoverd that. I registered for a 30 day trial license, but when I try to power on a guest, it tells me the vmmon module isnt loaded. When I modprobe it, it doesn't exist! What do I do now?

Lin-Darian · Post by **Lin-Darian** » Tue Sep 27, 2005 12:59 am

You'll need to goto a terminal prompt and su into root
Then run the /opt/vmware/bin/vmware-config.pl script to setup VMWare and build the proper modules.

Headrush · Post by **Headrush** » Tue Sep 27, 2005 2:16 am

qemu may be getting better all the time, but for me VMware Workstation just works without any problems for everything I need.

xordan · Post by **xordan** » Tue Sep 27, 2005 5:06 pm

VMware Workstation doesn't support 64-bit guest on my PC. Apparently the model of my amd64 is too old. Qemu does support 64-bit guest. Therefore I use Qemu

Headrush · Post by **Headrush** » Tue Sep 27, 2005 10:45 pm

xordan wrote:VMware Workstation doesn't support 64-bit guest on my PC. Apparently the model of my amd64 is too old. Qemu does support 64-bit guest. Therefore I use Qemu

Vmware 5.5 beta does, but is 64bit host support really more of a coolness factor and not really a limiting factor in finding an solution to running alternate OS apps.

nosatalian · Post by **nosatalian** » Wed Sep 28, 2005 6:35 am

I love VMware Workstation and own a license, but if you really wanted to could write a script to reset your clock before starting vmware, then launch it in the background, sleep 5 seconds and update the clock. Might look something like this:

date 12303940924
vmware&
sleep 5
/etc/init.d/ntp-client start

Where date gets a valid date.
I think timed licenses are kind of silly for this very reason, they should change to something more robust.

barum87 · Post by **barum87** » Wed Sep 28, 2005 8:22 pm

I've never used qemu, but I use vmware time to time.

I expected it to be really slow, but it was much faster than I thought.
[I'm using amd64 and windows 2000 on vmware]
And the driver that you installs on the guest os really helps.

I haven't figured out how to share files named in languages other than English on my linux partition, but I'm seriously considering deleting my windows 2003 partition.
[I'm dual booting just like you are]

xordan · Post by **xordan** » Thu Sep 29, 2005 10:59 pm

Headrush wrote:
xordan wrote:VMware Workstation doesn't support 64-bit guest on my PC. Apparently the model of my amd64 is too old. Qemu does support 64-bit guest. Therefore I use Qemu
Vmware 5.5 beta does, but is 64bit host support really more of a coolness factor and not really a limiting factor in finding an solution to running alternate OS apps.

No, 5.5 beta only has 64-bit guest support for the later amd64 models it seems. My model is too old.

"Workstation 5.5 introduces support for virtual machines with 64-bit guest operating systems, running on host machines with the following processors: AMD Athlon 64, revision D or later; AMD Opteron, revision E or later; and Intel EM64T VT-capable processors (experimental support)."

I have revision B or C I think.

chetan13 · Post by **chetan13** » Sat Oct 01, 2005 9:13 am

Does qemu allow the guest OS(windows) to use usb devices directly? I have just found out that microsoft provides our university with free licenses and am planning to install windows after a long time.

stim · Post by **stim** » Sat Oct 01, 2005 4:18 pm

chetan13 wrote:Does qemu allow the guest OS(windows) to use usb devices directly? I have just found out that microsoft provides our university with free licenses and am planning to install windows after a long time.

I can't confirm this with my own experience, but I remember reading that qemu does not, unfortunately, support usb at this time.

groovin · Post by **groovin** » Tue Oct 04, 2005 8:26 pm

qemu + accelerator works great... but i didnt like using NAT networking. im not sure if qemu can operate in bridged networking mode like vmware does, but vmware workstation offered alot of great features like snapshots and cloning and wasnt bad performance wise. if i want to run a linux guest or virtualize linux servers, id probaly stick with uml+skas or xen.

ive never tried any of vmwares beefier offereings like gsx server, but i hear theyre pretty damn good.

andrew_j_w · Post by **andrew_j_w** » Tue Oct 04, 2005 11:32 pm

I run qemu in a bridged network, it's a bit of a hassle as you have to set up the bridge yourself, but it works great for me.

Andrew

axelmasok · Post by **axelmasok** » Thu Oct 06, 2005 12:28 am

I use both but mostly vmware unfortunatly. It is much faster but unfortunatly is not free. If you can afford it buy it otherwise use qemu - it's more work but useable.

TerranAce007 · Post by **TerranAce007** » Fri Oct 07, 2005 7:35 pm

What about the Xen Virtualization system that is now a part of Fedora Core? Anyone tried it yet? The biggest downside is that it can't run windows, so if your running linux and looking for a way to run windows apps other than wine, it is of no use, but it can run other linux and BSD distros.