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April 14, 1999

An Almost Great Idea

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Has VMware created something great--only to hobble it with too high a price? Or is the software good enough that the price won't matter, and cross-platform developers will snap it up anyway? Will VMware find a home in your enterprise? Or with PC prices so cheap, would you prefer to rely on separate boxes for each operating system, thus ensuring total isolation and zero overhead?

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Fred Langa is a senior consulting editor and columnist for Windows Magazine. Fred's free weekly newsletter is available via subscribe@langa.com. You can contact him at fred@langa.com or via his website at http://www.langa.com.

By Fred Langa

The idea's been tried before, but finally--with today's powerful processors and abundant RAM--it looks like someone's pulled it off: "VMware" allows multiple operating-system environments to run concurrently using the same hardware resources.

That's a far cry from what we normally face if we want to run, say, Linux, the BeOS, and Windows on the same box. Now, we have to reboot between sessions and use a partitioning scheme plus a boot manager to effect the changes. And, generally speaking, it's an either/or proposition: It's one operating system at a time, and more or less one file system at a time.

But VMware, a Palo Alto, Calif., startup, takes a different approach. As you might guess, the "VM" in VMware stands for "virtual machine." In the company's words, when you run VMware, it creates a "Virtual Platform," which is "a thin software layer ... [that works by] transparently multiplexing all hardware resources into multiple virtual machines, each resembling the underlying machine."

Interestingly, each VM has its own unique network address and its own fault isolation and containment capabilities, meaning that "application crashes or data corruption occurring in a given virtual machine will not affect data or applications outside of that virtual machine."

The level of isolation is impressive: According to the company, a "Virtual Platform can encapsulate an entire session of a virtual machine within a transaction. At the end of the session, the user can commit the transaction and make all changes to the virtual disks permanent, or abort the transaction to revert the virtual machine to its original state."

In addition to the obvious applications, such as allowing fault-tolerant concurrent development or testing of applications for different operating systems, this high degree of isolation also offers a practical way to create a safe sandbox for almost any application. For instance, say you wanted to run some software of uncertain pedigree--an application downloaded from the Internet, for example: VMware's Virtual Platform would let you do that with very little risk of damage to your hardware, software, or network.

And because the Virtual Platform isn't an emulator (such as WINE or WABI), but instead runs an application on its native operating system, there's much less of a performance hit: The company says "the overhead of VMware Virtual Platform can be as low as 3% to 5%."

Right now, the software only works on x86-class CPUs. It's been tested with MS-DOS 6.0; Windows 3.1 through 98; NT 4.0 through Windows 2000 betas; FreeBSD 2.2.8; soft MS-DOS; Linux Red Hat 5.0, 5.1, and 5.2; Caldera OpenLinux 1.2 and 1.3; SUSE Linux 5.3 and 6.0; and Sun Solaris and Solaris Intel Edition.

A beta of a Linux version is available now, with NT to follow soon.

In all, it sounds super; in fact, it sounds like a must-have piece of software for anyone needing to work with multiple operating systems.

There's a lot more information than I can possibly fit in this column, but you can get additional details from TechWeb, Network Week or direct from the company.

But wait! (You knew there had to be a catch, right?) Here's the potential snag: The software will cost $300 a pop. In an era when you can buy an entire PC, including an operating system, for less than $300, and when operating systems themselves go for $100, or $50, or are downloadable for free, paying $300 for a virtual machine seems a bit pricey. It's not that $300 in itself is a huge barrier; it just seems out of whack with real-life prices for other software.

And that could be a mistake. VMware could achieve enormous distribution as more and more people look beyond Microsoft's offerings and start to experiment with other platforms. But rather than go for wide distribution, it looks as if VMware is aiming for much lower volume with a much higher margin per box.

What's your take? Has VMware created something great, only to hobble it with too high a price? Or is the software good enough that the price won't matter, and cross-platform developers will snap it up anyway? Do you think VMware will find a home in your company? Or with PCs so inexpensive, would you prefer to rely on separate boxes for each operating system, thus ensuring total isolation and zero overhead? Join in!

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