VMware Lets Several OSes Run Concurrently

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February 11, 1999 (4:12 PM EST)

By Andy Patrizio,

For PC users who have more than one operating system going at once, rebooting to switch between them may be a thing of the past.

Among the many new faces at Demo '99 -- the annual conference showcasing new technologies from start-ups and established vendors alike -- was VMware, which introduced its Virtual Platform technology. The VMware Virtual Platform is a thin software layer that hosts one OS inside another, letting users run two or more operating systems simultaneously on a PC.

The Virtual Platform technology is not emulation but the full operating system operating as it would if it were booted on the PC, said Reza Malekzadeh, director of product marketing for VMware. One operating system has to act as the host OS to start the computer. After it boots, the Virtual Platform -- which is only one megabyte in size -- can be started. At that point, the other operating systems can be run.

Currently Windows NT 4.0 and Linux are the only two host operating systems, although more will be added. MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and 98, Windows NT, Linux, and FreeBSD Unix can be run in the Virtual Platform. VMware expects to add more host and supported operating systems in the future, said Malekzadeh.

VMware is a good sell to hackers, computer tinkerers, and developers, but it's not a good sale to corporate America yet, said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies. "The applications you use on Linux have to be so compelling that it becomes the driving force [to use Virtual Platform]," he said.

"Today, as interesting as Linux is, from a pure productivity standpoint, there's not enough there to compel people to make that jump," said Bajarin. "When people start delivering something that gives us a reason to go to Linux at the application level, not just the server level, only then does [VMware] start to gain serious corporate attention."

A public beta version of VMware for Linux will be available for download on March 15 from VMware with a May release planned. The Windows NT beta is due for April, with final release in June. The price is $299.

Some hardware processes -- like CPU, memory, and disk access -- run at near normal speeds. Performance degradation is only around 3 percent to 5 percent from running on a PC outside of the Virtual Platform, said Malekzadeh.

For peripherals that use device drivers, such as video and sound cards, the Virtual Platform uses the host OS device driver. This causes a more significant degradation -- as much as 30 percent, said Malekzadeh.

Every Virtual Platform uses as much or as little memory as needed. The number of Virtual Platforms running is limited only by the PC hardware.

Each Virtual Platform running on the computer has its own IP address and looks like an individual machine to a network. Each platform is also a secure sandbox, which has two benefits. One, if it crashes, it doesn't take down the whole system. Two, if a virus infects one platform, it can't get out and infect other platforms.

USB support still needs work, which is why a beta won't ship until next month, said Malekzadeh. The first version of VMware Virtual Platform doesn't allow for cut and paste of data between the two platforms, but they can be saved to disk or even transferred using TCP/IP because the host and hosted OSes appear as two separate machines.