Virtual PC vs VMWare - XP Pro
I needed a test environment for a Windows box that was acting like a web server using Apache, MySQL, and PHP. I decided to try Microsoft’s Virtual PC since I was going to simulate XP Pro and I wanted to see if it was any good (I was using the Release Candidate 6.0.142.0). I had recently attended a small seminar on MS Products where one of instructors was saving it was “so fast” so I wanted to test it. Keep in mind I’m running a Core 2 Duo - 2.13 Ghz with 2 GB of ram.
The install for Virual PC itself was painless and quick. When installing XP Pro as a Virtual Machine I noticed it was quite a bit slower than I was used to when installing XP Pro on VMWare but just carried on. The Virtual Machine loaded up and worked fine for the most part but I did notice it seemed a bit sluggish, even with some pretty bad mouse lag at times. I first installed Xxamp but found it was a bit “overdone” for what I was doing and then tried WAMP and really liked it.
I was working with moving some SQL stuff around and had a program that does some simple queries to pull information out of a database. There is a fair amount of information but nothing staggering by far. Here’s the disappointing part…with a 60 second timeout the Virtual Machine couldn’t pull the information fast enough! I was stunned! There wasn’t much to it but it just kept dying. I made sure I didn’t have anything going rampant on my machine and tried again but no luck! It was so slow I decided just to start over with VMWare.
VMWare is really great to setup and get moving on if you ask me. I was able to create a VMX package using the fantastic online tools at EasyVMX! and had XP Pro installed about 35% faster than what it took the MS VirtualPC to do it. VMWare does get a slight knock because I had to go digging for VMWare Tools to get my NIC working if I remember correctly but that wasn’t a real big deal.
VMWare felt nearly twice as fast as Virtual PC and I had WAMP setup and running the same program without a problem. Using the same 60 second timeout VMWare had the machine running very smoothly and me very happy.
VMWare defeats Virtual PC in 2nd round knockout!
Note* - MS Has just re-released virtual PC so maybe it’s faster but I really doubt it!
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Tags: Virtualization, VMWare, Windows
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One Response to “Virtual PC vs VMWare - XP Pro”
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November 25th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Probably going to have some more content on VMWare in the future, but I think it’s the current wave. Right now, working in Cisco IP Call Center Environment you can run a small call center/admin cluster with 3-5 servers, or in our real environment with 7 Call Centers multiple small sites connected via network across the midwest we are pushing 50 total components of all kind. Now in a real environment, it would not be done, but going back to Cisco for training, they are able to simulate and entire IP Phone System cluster on one server using VMware. In this case, it’s a phenomenal tool for training a complex environment with limited resources. Outside of the phone system, our IT department is going to be consolidating the function of 20-30 servers down to all running on 4 high power servers running VMware. Long term, the cost and resource savings with VMware now that it’s proving to be a solid, fast, efficient platform could be a major game changer in Information Technologies if it isn’t already.