Wednesday, November 09, 2005 10:56 AM
Well, I guess I've made the switch from Virtual PC. I've really enjoyed my time with VPC, but VMWare seems to have smoked it! The ability to run VM's tabbed or stand-along windows is pretty cool. Even better is the ability to keep hierarchical snapshots and linked clones. That one feature would bring VPC back into the running probably. I also like how VMWare lets you expose just about any device to the VM. VPC does not support USB, or much else really. It's a lowest common denominator approach to virtualization. VMWare supports common disk controller, video, network, and sound hardware, but gives you much more flexibility in adding additional devices.
One thing that I don't like is the lack of a pause for VMWare. With VPC I can pause and resume almost instantly. VMWare forces you to suspend the VM (as though you clicked Stand By or closed the lid on a laptop). The VPC method is invisible to the VM (unless it's paying attention to the clock or has open network connections that timeout), while VMWare causes the guest OS itself to go into standby mode. I suppose it's much more compatible to suspend, but not as convenient sometimes.
I'm also not as enamoured with the host/guest interaction features. Dragging-and-dropping files must occur between Explorer windows -- never the Desktop like VPC allows. I frequently find that the mouse pointer has strange behavior when moving back and forth. A double-edged-sword feature, is the fact that the system appears to be done resuming before it really is. So if you resume a suspended VM, it comes up as though ready, yet you can't do anything yet. I'd rather it just show a progress gauge so I know it's not ready yet. That's what VPC does. Overall though, starting and stopping VM's is much faster than in VPC. I like that a lot! Performance just feels zippier overall.
This is with VMWare 5.0. I intend to upgrade to 5.5 as soon as it comes out. The ability to mount disk images as local disks and better integrate with existing VPC images sound nice. The improved DirectX support will be nicer too. VPC has practically no DirectX support, and no hardware accelerated 3D support at all.
Overall, it seems like Microsoft just has no real desire to innovate in this area and is updating the Connectix product as more of a token effort than anything. VMWare is definitely competing and comes out on top in most areas.