[PLUG] using VM Ware for "real" work -- has any one had success with this?

[Rogan Creswick]

On 5/29/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb at cesmail.net> wrote:
> 1. If your main requirement is to communicate with Windows users, you
> probably ought to be running it the other way around -- a Windows host
> and a Linux guest.

My main requirement is a workstation that I can bear to work with on a
daily basis, and do so without loosing productivity :)  Most of what I
do is code (in java, c#, haskell, lisp or perl) and crunch data
generated by the tools created in the coding phase :).  Both these
steps are infinitely easier for me in a linux environment, and often
these things become very processor intensive, so running that
environment as a guest is sub-optimal.

> 2. VMware ain't magic. Every byte of memory the host and guest uses has
> to really be in the machine. Every CPU cycle the host and guest execute
> must get executed. And every byte that gets written to disk, permanently
> or temporarily, has to get written to disk. In other words, if you're
> trying to jam two workloads into one machine with VMware, you're gonna
> be slow.

After turning *everything* down re: visual effects (but keeping the
resolution to 1280x1024 or so), and disabling all the resident
processes that were running, it's working quite well.  I can use word
and visio (independantly, haven't tried them together) as quickly as I
can when running XP natively.

In some respects this setup is actually *faster*.  Because I do *all*
of the "dangerous" things in the linux host (email, browse, access
network shares, run programs... etc.) I'm comfortable turning off some
things that I would be unable to do if running XP as a host.  The
antivirus doesn't need to scan daily, for example, and I don't need an
XP-based firewall.  Those two things alone have freed up many, many
resources.

Thanks for all the help!

--Rogan