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14 Responses to “Virtualization for Intel-powered Macs”
This *is* interesting. The question is whether a binary re-write style virtualisation (which is what this has to be, I’m pretty sure) has the performance required by desktop users. Paravirtualisation (where you either rewrite small parts of kernel code or require hardware support like VT) can offer genuinely ‘near-native’ speeds that the linked site boasts of. Xen is pretty much the lead paravirtualisation solution, and you genuinely have both operating systems running side-by-side on the same machine. Both are isolated from each other, so there is no crash-interdependency between operating systems, resources are genuinely fairly partitioned so that neither OS can consume all available memory and there are other more academic advantages.
However, for a web designer, wanting just to confirm page appearance on several browsers, I’m not sure how big a deal any of this is. 95% of the time, the XP machine is going to be suspended, only brought back to life for a quick F5-and-check. Performance won’t be an issue. Stability maybe not even so much.
Apart from a few edge cases like this, I really can’t see the advantage of having commoditised dual-OS systems. Obviously there’s the advantage for Apple that brings many more people to the hardware platform, but where, really, is the long-term win for users?
For a free alternative, try Q, which is a Cocoa version of qemu: http://www.kberg.ch/q/
(I haven’t tried it since I don’t have an Intel based Mac, but it sure looks cool.)
Even better. They’ve just created a whole new market for Macs.
But I can’t view the screen shots to save my life (server timeouts) and that’s quite frustrating. You’d think they would prepare for a lot of traffic and plan accordingly.
henry, are you talking about the long term win in general of being able to run windoze on mac, or just this particular product?
long term win for a lot of us is not having to have two machines.
of course, as a business analyst that routinely tests new programs for functionality before implementation, this just made my life a lot more complicated. :O
Hey man, got a question for ya. Would you be willing to do a post on how you got videos into Flash for Heather’s website? Do you go from MPEG to Flash somehow? Do you have an app to do it, or is that a part of the new Flash studio?
I’m pretty stoked about virtualization too. Dual boot is great, but for just running 1 or 2 Windows-only apps, this is way better. I hope their claims about “near full-speed” are true.
becky - i get that hardware consolidation is a good thing, i was just imagining that performance under this kind of virtualisation might not be sufficient. Especially for CAD, as an example, which require use of graphics card functionality that typically isn’t virtualised. Paravirtualisation would make this a bit more bearable.
I guess I was just musing on whether there were a lot of cases where application requirements were spread across two separate operating systems, and how often this occurs outside of the workplace (because you would expect a workplace to standardise on an operating system if at all possible, and at the least to give you a KVM switch if not ). Games, I suppose, are the big deal here, but virtualisation really isn’t a solution to that problem.
PTC: Xen has long been the one to beat, but I am biased; I work in the same lab that it came from.
Henry - Xen has the technical superiority, but is not yet enterprise ready. I suspect it’s two years away. During that time, VMware is going to be building up market share, complementors, and all of the positive network externalities that come with market share. Xen will come out on top in the long run, particularly with Virtual Iron’s sweet tools, but in the short run, firms are just looking for any consolidation/containment in order to alleviate the space and power crunch and VMware gives them that today enterprise ready.
kwan - not really: as far as I can tell, that’s on a dual-boot system, whose performance should be pretty much native. It was the virtualised performance that I was interested in.
ptc - you may well be right, although I believe Xen is seeing some enterprise take-up even now.
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April 6th, 2006 at 6:56 am
Gosh that makes me feel a little nauseous, somehow.
April 6th, 2006 at 7:15 am
This *is* interesting. The question is whether a binary re-write style virtualisation (which is what this has to be, I’m pretty sure) has the performance required by desktop users. Paravirtualisation (where you either rewrite small parts of kernel code or require hardware support like VT) can offer genuinely ‘near-native’ speeds that the linked site boasts of. Xen is pretty much the lead paravirtualisation solution, and you genuinely have both operating systems running side-by-side on the same machine. Both are isolated from each other, so there is no crash-interdependency between operating systems, resources are genuinely fairly partitioned so that neither OS can consume all available memory and there are other more academic advantages.
However, for a web designer, wanting just to confirm page appearance on several browsers, I’m not sure how big a deal any of this is. 95% of the time, the XP machine is going to be suspended, only brought back to life for a quick F5-and-check. Performance won’t be an issue. Stability maybe not even so much.
Apart from a few edge cases like this, I really can’t see the advantage of having commoditised dual-OS systems. Obviously there’s the advantage for Apple that brings many more people to the hardware platform, but where, really, is the long-term win for users?
April 6th, 2006 at 7:41 am
While this was to be expected, it doesn’t make me want to throw myself into oncoming traffic any less.
April 6th, 2006 at 8:15 am
For a free alternative, try Q, which is a Cocoa version of qemu:
http://www.kberg.ch/q/
(I haven’t tried it since I don’t have an Intel based Mac, but it sure looks cool.)
April 6th, 2006 at 8:29 am
Even better. They’ve just created a whole new market for Macs.
But I can’t view the screen shots to save my life (server timeouts) and that’s quite frustrating. You’d think they would prepare for a lot of traffic and plan accordingly.
April 6th, 2006 at 8:32 am
henry, are you talking about the long term win in general of being able to run windoze on mac, or just this particular product?
long term win for a lot of us is not having to have two machines.
of course, as a business analyst that routinely tests new programs for functionality before implementation, this just made my life a lot more complicated. :O
April 6th, 2006 at 9:11 am
Speaking of Xen, this Virtual Iron announcement has pretty much made Xen the firm to beat, regardless of VMware’s head start.
http://tinyurl.com/m9oot
April 6th, 2006 at 9:51 am
Hey man, got a question for ya. Would you be willing to do a post on how you got videos into Flash for Heather’s website? Do you go from MPEG to Flash somehow? Do you have an app to do it, or is that a part of the new Flash studio?
I’m pretty stoked about virtualization too. Dual boot is great, but for just running 1 or 2 Windows-only apps, this is way better. I hope their claims about “near full-speed” are true.
April 6th, 2006 at 10:52 am
It’s good for people who need to run Windows supported apps outside of IE (like AutoCAD or Revit) but do everything else with a Mac.
April 6th, 2006 at 11:09 am
becky - i get that hardware consolidation is a good thing, i was just imagining that performance under this kind of virtualisation might not be sufficient. Especially for CAD, as an example, which require use of graphics card functionality that typically isn’t virtualised. Paravirtualisation would make this a bit more bearable.
I guess I was just musing on whether there were a lot of cases where application requirements were spread across two separate operating systems, and how often this occurs outside of the workplace (because you would expect a workplace to standardise on an operating system if at all possible, and at the least to give you a KVM switch if not
). Games, I suppose, are the big deal here, but virtualisation really isn’t a solution to that problem.
PTC: Xen has long been the one to beat, but I am biased; I work in the same lab that it came from.
April 6th, 2006 at 11:40 am
Henry - Xen has the technical superiority, but is not yet enterprise ready. I suspect it’s two years away. During that time, VMware is going to be building up market share, complementors, and all of the positive network externalities that come with market share. Xen will come out on top in the long run, particularly with Virtual Iron’s sweet tools, but in the short run, firms are just looking for any consolidation/containment in order to alleviate the space and power crunch and VMware gives them that today enterprise ready.
April 6th, 2006 at 2:11 pm
“That didn’t take long”… and neither did this:
http://tinyurl.com/lrauk
April 6th, 2006 at 7:41 pm
Henry - does this answer your performance question?
http://forevergeek.com/news/battlefield_2_on_macbookpro.php
April 7th, 2006 at 4:50 am
kwan - not really: as far as I can tell, that’s on a dual-boot system, whose performance should be pretty much native. It was the virtualised performance that I was interested in.
ptc - you may well be right, although I believe Xen is seeing some enterprise take-up even now.