[desktop-discuss] Running Windoze in a VM?

[Dennis Clarke]

> Dennis Clarke wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I'm in the unfortunate postion of having to run some Windoze apps
>>> (stupid vendor thinks that Windoze is a good development platform...),
>>> but natuarally enough, I find Solaris to be a much more productive
>>> environment.  Looks like the best way forward would be to run
>>> Windoze in some sort of VM, a la VMware.  Assuming its possible,
>>> what's the best way of running Windoze as a client OS in a virtual
>>> machine, with Nevada build 70 (or newer) as the host OS?
>>>
>>
>> The best way ?
>>
>> Can't be done with Solaris.  Period.
>>
>
> Not true.  You're focused only on VMware, I think
> he only gave that merely as a possible solution example.

No Sir.

I can assure you that I live in front of Solaris on a day to day basis and I
have *really* tried to run some sort of virtual machine.  I don't need
Windows for much of anything other than Lotus Notes work and the IBM people
seem to be moving like molasses on a re-release of the Solaris x86 ( or
Sparc ! ) based Lotus Notes client again.  So I have tried :

http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/stuff/thin/remote_virtual_machine_qemu.png

and tried

http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/stuff/thin/qemu_082_sparcv8plus_win98_boot.png

and tried

http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/stuff/thin/qemu_082_sparcv8plus_win98_mem_err.png

and tried :

http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/stuff/thin/windows_world.png

with QEMU and in every case it was so slow and with network functionality
that was terrible.

I really need to climb back on that horse again and see if I can virtualize
x86 from a Sparc machine and vice versa. Who know .. I think Ben Taylor has
done great work with QEMU and there may be reason to revisit this again.

But for a supported environment you need VMware.

> Can be done with win4solaris.
> http://www.win4solaris.com

I must check that out!

> Also qemu, if you don't mind rolling up your sleeves a bit.
> Lots of info on both of these on blogs.sun.com.

within a year this may be a moot topic where we have QEMU running like a
charm. In my opinion QEMU is an emulator as opposed to a simulator. It
replaces the hardware from the barewire up.  I think that VMware is a
simulator or layer on top of the OS and hardware which allows some code to
execute on the actual hardware. Within QEMU you are living in a virtual
hardware world at all times.

Other people may certainly add a great deal more to this I am sure.

Dennis