What will you VmWare today?

Another day, another great thing learnt: VmWare (with the trademark sign)

This software is one of the most powerful utilities that a driver writer could ever hope for.
It allows me to run an operating system (the guest OS) while I am running another operating system (the host OS).

ON THE SAME PC AT THE SAME TIME!

Whoa! At first all I thought was "What an immensely stupid way of draining PC resources"...
But as always, I keep learning new things. And why someone went through all the trouble to create those new things.


So why would you use VmWare(TM) ? - Remember to put the (TM) there : Its a trademark. That makes it illegal to use frivolously. And if I forget, then pretend that its there. That way, I can conveniently keep forgetting and save up on the typing time.


Back to the question. Why VmWare?
Lets suppose that you are creating a cross platform utility thats supposed to work on Win NT, 2K, XP, 2K3. Maybe some *NIX also FreeBSD, Linux, etc.


Would you really want to buy all the hardware for each and every one of these os's?

So you'd do dual boots. Maybe triple boots. Or more! How much disk space do you want to waste today?
And furthermore, once installed, removing the OS isnt possible without formatting that partition... And in case you're trying to put something else there? then removing that partition.

What about irrecoverable system crashes???

Oh gods what a pain!


Enter VmWare! No more pain! New OS installation thinks that it has the entire partition to itself. In reality, it just has a single file on the host OS behaving like a sinlge HDD! VmWare fools the guest os into thinking that everything is fine and dandy...

So when you want to remove it... Delete the directory containing all the "HDD" for that OS. As simple as that!

If you crash it? No problemmo! Either re-install... Or if you've read the manual, then go back in time to an instant snapshot!


I'll have more when I learn more!