From owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Nov 25 04:50:48 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BD80516A4CE for ; Thu, 25 Nov 2004 04:50:48 +0000 (GMT) Received: from mail1.webmaster.com (mail1.webmaster.com [216.152.64.168]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8E41643D60 for ; Thu, 25 Nov 2004 04:50:48 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from davids@webmaster.com) Received: from however by webmaster.com (MDaemon.PRO.v7.1.0.R) with ESMTP id md50000296447.msg for ; Wed, 24 Nov 2004 20:27:03 -0800 From: "David Schwartz" To: Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2004 20:50:39 -0800 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.6604 (9.0.2911.0) Importance: Normal In-Reply-To: <1101342070.1100.39.camel@chaucer> X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.2180 X-Authenticated-Sender: joelkatz@webmaster.com X-Spam-Processed: mail1.webmaster.com, Wed, 24 Nov 2004 20:27:03 -0800 (not processed: message from trusted or authenticated source) X-MDRemoteIP: 206.171.168.138 X-Return-Path: davids@webmaster.com X-MDaemon-Deliver-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org X-MDAV-Processed: mail1.webmaster.com, Wed, 24 Nov 2004 20:27:07 -0800 Subject: RE: VMWare X-BeenThere: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list Reply-To: davids@webmaster.com List-Id: Non technical items related to the community List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2004 04:50:48 -0000 > I didn't get a very good answer to my question about whether it was > worth using if all the client operating systems were FreeBSD or Linux. It depends what you're doing. > For these (much better) OSs, reboots are very rarely needed. The OS > provides all the facilities required for protecting applications from > one another, and sharing resources between applications in a reasonable > way. This is not really true. You cannot easily create the illusion of multiple machines with their own rules, users, and networking setup. The resource sharing always runs into problems. If you share by processes, for example, whoever makes more processes gets more CPU. > It is easy to kill runaway applications. So would there be much > point in running VMWare with several guest copies of FreeBSD? Maybe not, again, it depends what you're doing. What happens when the next person you want to let use the machine really needs Linux for some reason? What happens when person needs to be able to customize the kernel? Or needs a special network filtering module? Vmware lets you do a lot of things that are difficult to impossible to do any other way. If you don't need any of these things, you don't need Vmware. It's certainly great for a desktop when you need to support a large number of different operating systems. It's great for kernel development, where a crash can be debugged from one vm to another without hosing your editor session working on the code. DS