There seem to be a couple of flavors. the hypervisor is what you describe above and the other one that I’ve read about on VMWare’s site is where you just run some kind of executable from within your OS and you get your VM perched on top of everything else.

I think the latter is largely intended to be used as an “appliance” where something like Oracle or other specialized app can be distributed on a customized or properly configured platform rather than relying on the end user to set things up correctly. Also, I suppose, different software may have conflicting requirements and this would be a cool way to get around that issue.

I was actually looking at VMs for home use so I could have a virtualized version of my laptop and / or desktop that I could then back them up nightly so, in the event of a problem, I could just restore an older copy. Also, then I could run my laptop VM on my desktop for configuration and consistency purposes but then take it with me when I traveled.

A lot of potential there, but I really couldn’t figure out the licensing for the OS(es) or which product(s) would be needed from VMWare. I figure it will take about 3-5 years before they make the software / pricing / offerings useful to folks like me.

I *do* rather like the idea of taking my computer around with me on a USB key or my iPod and just plugging it into any computer, working as if I was at home and then unplugging without leaving a trace on other either machine.

I haven’t looked at VMWare myself yet, but from what people have told me, at boot time, it loads first, and creates ‘virtual machines’ on your hardware. Then you go to a virtual machine, and start an operating system on it (i.e. Vista). Then you can go to a 2end machine and start another operating system (i.e. Linux, or anohter instance of Vista).

With OS/2 the dos boxes acually had 640K of memory usable, so I thought VMWare might perform similar ‘magic’.

At work, there is a big push to move off real servers to virtual servers. I’m not sure what ‘virtualizing’ software they have been using, but they are moving to VMWare, as curently, a Virtual serer has a limit of just over 3gig memory, and a single CPU image. With VMWare, we can get virtual serers with > 3Gig memory, and multiple CPU images. (I don’t know what the real hardware requirements are or this.) I would think you could create a virual image with more memory than is really on the hardware (might perform poorly).

Or does VMWare do something fancy to emulate the base-OS consumed resources and make the VM think it’s got the whole hardware box to itself?

I was also going to say “why would you want more than 640K”, but even then, drivers took out the top 5-10%

I guess for all practical purposes, one might as well go for 3 gig of memory, but hey, what’s a 100 bucks.