Overview on VMWare Workstation and Player

In one of my previous blogs, I wrote on Virtualization and its role in productivity and resource optimization. It also plays crucial part in having power savings by reducing the number of servers. Virtualization, as a solution, is considered very seriously by many organizations. In this blog, the review of one such Virtualization product, VMware Workstation is presented. Before starting, let me clarify. Neither I am an investor nor a paid reviewer. I try to present my personal views based on more than four years of experience with VMware workstation and one year experience with VMWare player.

Running Multiple VMs
VMWare workstation had a modest start and three years back, you cannot have more than one virtual machine running on your system. Meaning that you can create as many virtual machine as you need but you can have only one VM live and running. Over a period of time, this restriction was overcome and now one can run any number of virtual machines. When you start a virtual machine, you need to understand that you are running an operating system inside an application which runs on a physical operating system (or hardware). In order to explain clearly, each virtual machines (called as Guest OS), runs inside VMWare which is an application that runs on Linux/Windows (physical system). Often people forget this and expect that their virtual machines to be rocket fast. Really speaking, for every virtual machine you need to have at least 1GB RAM to run smoothly. Here the key is running so many virtual machines in parallel.

Modes of Networking
The next feature is that one can have so many network configurations like NATed environment, Host only networking, No networking and bridged networking. VMWare comes with virtualized DHCP server which takes care of IP address allocation to your virtual machines. The user has liberty to modify the IP addresses provided by VMWare through reasonably good user interface. Apart from this network configuration, one can form virtual team. The virtual team is the network of virtual machines. The virtual team is similar to that of real network and interestingly VMWare provides ways to configure network packets loss percentage.

Virtual Devices
Since all the devices are virtualized, one can add hardware to the virtual machine. VMWare workstation allows you to create 25 ethernet cards. One can increase the size of virtual hard disk or add new hard disk.


Snapshot Manager
VMWare also has Snapshot manager. A snapshot is nothing but a frozen state. At any instant of time, the user can freeze the state of virtual machine and the snapshot can be restored. VMWare comes with a nice and interactive Snapshot manager which makes archiving the states easier for you. This is the one of the cool feature that I like in VMWare. If you do not have time to analyze an issue, you can archive it and revisit later. The other features like record and playback and suspend are notable features.

Using VMWare workstation one can create virtual machines and run them. Typically, we will not be creating VM all times. We will create VMs once in while and put them in production by running the VMs. So, in order to run a VM, VMWare player is enough. In VMWare player, it just runs only one Virtual machine. You do not have the luxury of running a team or many VMs. By the way, Workstation is commercial product but Player is a free software.

Hope this write up will help you to understand VMWare better. More information can be found here.