Re: [Xen-users] VMWARE Player alternative

[Anthony Liguori <aliguori@xxxxxxxxxx>]

M.A. Williamson wrote:
> > Thanks for the info! I demo'd qemu and while it works o.k, I don't 
> > think better then VMplayer. It got someways to go - I'll keep my eye 
> > on it!
> It has some pretty nifty features, including compatibility with 
> (single file) VMware virtual disks and (I think) Virtual PC virtual 
> disks, as well as it's own copy on write format (so you can snapshot 
> the disk state at various points).
> The main disadvantage is probably speed, but with the current (in 
> beta) accelerator module there is a substantial speedup - did you try 
> this?
> The other disadvantage is the GUI - it's not very friendly. There are 
> some wrappers for starting QEmu from a GUI but basically it's waiting 
> for somebody industrious to create a proper GTK or QT GUI with VMware 
> Player type functionality.
Sort of like http://qemu.codemonkey.ws/screenshots/main-window.png

I don't think Fabrice likes the idea of integrating a GTK GUI into QEmu 
though.  Exposing a proper VNC display could be a viable solution though 
(especially now that QEmu has a proper absolute mouse).
> > Though it would be nice for XEN team to come up with a solution like 
> > that of VMware Player
> It would indeed. Unfortunately Xen needs to be installed and booted 
> into before you can run Xen domains. Once Xen becomes more pervasive 
> (lots of distros are starting to ship it) it'll probably make sense to 
> have a player / workstation style GUI for people who are running Xen 
> on a single system. This could be very nice - especially once 
> Vanderpool / Pacifica hardware becomes commonplace.
Actually, there are other alternatives.  One could write a kernel module 
that implemented enough of the Xen hypercall interface such that you 
could run a Xen guest on a normal Linux kernel.
Then it's just a matter of creating a GUI.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> There are lots of little tricks you can do to make the tools nice. 
> Scrapbook for UML allows you to click on a hyperlink to a running UML 
> virtual machine and have that VM appear with a virtual display on your 
> computer. This can be used (for instance) to demo software - click a 
> link on the vendor's homepage and get a virtual machine with the 
> product up and running. If you don't like it, just ditch that VM. If 
> you do, then install the software properly. Pretty neat, and there are 
> lots of possibilities too.
> Cheers,
> mark
>
> > M.A. Williamson wrote:
> > > QEmu (http://www.qemu.org)
> > >
> > > Or if you're on a PPC or Intel Mac, take a look at Q: 
> > > http://www.kberg.ch/q/
> > > (Q is basically a release of QEmu that's had a nifty Mac GUI put on it)
> > >
> > > QEmu has an optional binary-only accelerator module that will boost 
> > > the speed significantly but is closed-source (for now). There's an 
> > > open source accelerator for Qemu called QVM86 but it's less advanced.
> > > Cheers,
> > > Mark
> > >
> > > On Apr 20 2006, Joe Lee wrote:
> > >
> > > > Thought I post this question here: Is there an open source 
> > > > alternative to VMware Player. I know it's a free product BUT would 
> > > > like to know if there is any known other open source alternatives. 
> > > > Thanks in advance for your comments!
> > > > Joe
> > > >
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > Xen-users mailing list
> > > > Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > > > http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
> _______________________________________________
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