Zen v. vmware-Workstation to virtualize XP in 10.2

Post by David C. Rankin
Mates,
As a follow on to the previous Zen thread, I too would like further
pre-install information on Zen verses vmware-Workstation. I'm
dual-booting 10.2 and XP on my laptop at present and I would like to
install XP into a virtual machine within 10.2 so I don't need to ever
reboot (now rarely) to get into XP. I have a P4 duo-core processor
w/1Gig of RAM and plenty of harddrive space. Where can I get more info
to see if Zen will work or whether I will have to try a closed source
vmware-Workstation. The only apps I ever need in XP are quickbooks, and
occasionally an old Micrografx Designer.

Have you tried Wine for these apps? They don't seem particularly demanding
and I would assume Wine would work. Much less taxing.

Personally, I don't feel that 1gb of RAM is really enough to do virtual
machines. Either your main machine or your virtual machine has to get
squeezed too much.

BTW, it is "Xen" not "Zen" "-)

There is also a new article on the wiki dealing with virtualization:

ttp://news.opensuse.org/?p=371
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Dennis E. Slice

2007-09-27 21:25:53 UTC

FWIW, you might check out VirtualBox, too. Last week I installed DOS,
Windows XP, openSUSE 10.2, and Ubuntu 7.04 on VirtualBox virtual
machines. There was some apparent stability issues during installation,
but I eventually got everything installed and running enough for me to
test my own Java app's installation, etc. I am running SUSE 10.0 as my
host OS.

I am also working with collaborators on a book, and they use Word. While
I got that all running in a VirtualBox XP machine, I actually work in a
vmware 4.0 virtual machine. I have used it for some years with no
stability problems. Also, it support expansion to true full screen on my
laptop which VirtualBox does not. For those reasons, I have decided to
upgrade and continue using vmware as my primary virtual machine system,
but I could see being happy with VirtualBox.

I have used some custom (Delphi and C++) apps under wine. They worked
fine except I never could get it to use a readably large font. After
some recent upgrading and fiddling to improve the font situation, an
important old app has now become unstable, so its back to the vmware XP
machine for that one.

-ds

PS: Yes, this is top posted to save scrolling for those who can infer
what I'm talking about from the title. The original message follows if
you can't.

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Jonathan Ervine

2007-09-28 02:19:37 UTC

Post by Jonathan Arnold

Post by David C. Rankin
Mates,
I have a P4
duo-core processor w/1Gig of RAM and plenty of harddrive space.
Where can I get more info to see if Zen will work or whether I will
have to try a closed source vmware-Workstation. The only apps I
ever need in XP are quickbooks, and occasionally an old Micrografx
Designer.

You should also consider VMware Server. Yes, it's also closed source,
but is freely available/downloadable.

Post by Jonathan Arnold
Have you tried Wine for these apps? They don't seem particularly
demanding and I would assume Wine would work. Much less taxing.

I also agree that wine should be capable of running these applications.
Of course, Crossover Office from Codeweavers is available to provide a
shiny front end to wine to make using it much easier.

Post by Jonathan Arnold
Personally, I don't feel that 1gb of RAM is really enough to do
virtual machines. Either your main machine or your virtual machine
has to get squeezed too much.

/nods - 1GB is _just about_ enough to get one VM running, and it feels
sluggish either in the VM, the host, or both :-)

Post by Jonathan Arnold
BTW, it is "Xen" not "Zen" "-)
http://news.opensuse.org/?p=371

Also worth pointing out that Xen requires CPUs with the virtualisation
technology on board to be able to virtualise Windows XP (you could also
use LVM as well for that matter). You can check for this support in
your processors by looking for the flags in /proc/cpuinfo - for AMD
it's svm, for Intel it's vmx

Regards,
Jon

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Jonathan Ervine

2007-09-28 02:35:33 UTC

XP (you could also use LVM as well for that matter). You can check

Damn - lame self reply, but this mis-spelling is catching. I did, of
course, mean KVM...

Jon

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David C. Rankin

2007-09-28 08:25:47 UTC

Post by Jonathan Arnold

You should also consider VMware Server. Yes, it's also closed source,
but is freely available/downloadable.

Post by Jonathan Arnold
Have you tried Wine for these apps? They don't seem particularly
demanding and I would assume Wine would work. Much less taxing.

I also agree that wine should be capable of running these applications.
Of course, Crossover Office from Codeweavers is available to provide a
shiny front end to wine to make using it much easier.

Post by Jonathan Arnold
Personally, I don't feel that 1gb of RAM is really enough to do
virtual machines. Either your main machine or your virtual machine
has to get squeezed too much.

/nods - 1GB is _just about_ enough to get one VM running, and it feels
sluggish either in the VM, the host, or both :-)

Post by Jonathan Arnold
BTW, it is "Xen" not "Zen" "-)
http://news.opensuse.org/?p=371

Hmm. Crud.. i looks like I have 'vme' on both cores:

[root Rankin-P35a:/home/david] # cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 4
model name : Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.33GHz
stepping : 1
cpu MHz : 1867.000
cache size : 1024 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 2
core id : 0
cpu cores : 1
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 5
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge
mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe
constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl est tm2 cid xtpr
bogomips : 6671.97
clflush size : 64

processor : 1
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 4
model name : Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.33GHz
stepping : 1
cpu MHz : 1867.000
cache size : 1024 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 2
core id : 0
cpu cores : 1
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 5
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge
mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe
constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl est tm2 cid xtpr
bogomips : 6669.25
clflush size : 64

Does anyone know if vme absolutely won't work? More reading to do...
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Jonathan Ervine

2007-09-28 09:21:00 UTC

Post by David C. Rankin
Mates,
I have a P4
duo-core processor w/1Gig of RAM and plenty of harddrive space.

flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr
pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm
pbe constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl est tm2 cid xtpr
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr
pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm
pbe constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl est tm2 cid xtpr
Does anyone know if vme absolutely won't work? More reading to do...

Sorry - definitely not supporting hardware assisted virtualisation (i.e.
capable of virtualising Windows operating systems):
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/linux/linux-tip-how-to-tell-if-your-processor-supports-vt/

Jon

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David C. Rankin

2007-09-29 03:56:28 UTC

Post by David C. Rankin
Mates,
I have a P4
duo-core processor w/1Gig of RAM and plenty of harddrive space.

Sorry - definitely not supporting hardware assisted virtualisation (i.e.
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/linux/linux-tip-how-to-tell-if-your-processor-supports-vt/
Jon

Jon,

Is that a prohibition on being able to do it at all? Or, is that a
performance issue in that you won't be offloading the vt work to the
newer vt processor extensions?
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510 Ochiltree Street
Nacogdoches, Texas 75961
(936) 715-9333
(936) 715-9339 fax
www.rankinlawfirm.com

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Jonathan Ervine

2007-10-02 05:05:31 UTC

Post by David C. Rankin
Mates,
I have a P4
duo-core processor w/1Gig of RAM and plenty of harddrive space.

Sorry - definitely not supporting hardware assisted virtualisation
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/linux/linux-tip-how-to-tell-if-your-
processor-supports-vt/
Jon

Jon,
Is that a prohibition on being able to do it at all? Or, is that a
performance issue in that you won't be offloading the vt work to the
newer vt processor extensions?

That is going to prevent you from doing any hardware assisted
virtualisation (i.e. Windows). You will still be able to do
para-virtualisation (i.e. other Linuxes/BSDs). This is because there is
no version of Windows available with the necessary kernel changes
(apparently only one company can modify the Windows kernel...)

So in summary, in Xen are you able to:
Virtualise unmodified operating systems - no
Virtualise modified operating systems via para-virtualisation - yes

Jon

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Jerome R. Westrick

2007-10-09 11:39:59 UTC