Brian's Brain

This blog post references my cover story 'Virtualization: Silicon And Software Salvation, Or Technological Tower Of Babel?' in EDN's October 2, 2008 edition. It's one of a series of web addendums to the print writeup.

If you'd like to peruse Figures 2-4 in higher-resolution detail, or if you'd like to check out the data behind the colored bars and lines, then hit up this link to download the multi-sheet Excel spreadsheet that I used to generate the graphics. Note that in order to do so, I 'hid' some of the rows in some of the sheets; 'unhide' them to see all of the numbers and their respective categories. However, keep in mind one of the points I made in my print writeup:

SiSoftware’s utility also output scaled performance-versus-clock-rate and performance-versus-power-consumption data, but [the figures don't] show it because the utility is unreliable in a virtualized configuration. Recall that the virtualized CPU and core logic connect through a 4-GHz front-side bus and that the virtualized DRAM is of the ancient, asynchronous EDO flavor. All of these factors greatly distort the virtualized per-megahertz and per-watt-performance results.

And if you'd like to see the even more voluminous source data from SiSoftware's Sandra that I fed (in part) into Excel, hit up this link for a ZIP of the ASCII text report files.

As my article notes, VMware Fusion isn't your only option for virtualizing on top of Apple Mac OS X. In my initial MacBook experiments, I used Parallels' Desktop For Mac (formerly Workstation For Mac) quite a bit, and this encompassing Google link will lead you to my coverage. Note the publishing dates; the program's evolved a fair bit since then.

If your foundation O/S is Windows, you don't necessarily need to shell out cash to add virtualization to your system's capability repertoire; both Microsoft and VMware offer no-cost limited-function product options (and subsequent to that writeup's publication, VMware even began offering a free entry-level variant of its bare-metal ESXi hypervisor-based product). Parallels' products aren't OS X-only; Linux- and Windows-based options are also available. And if your virtualization needs are more humble, check out open-source, multi-platform DOSBox (and its OS X-optimized Boxer variant).

Speaking of open source, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Xen, managed by XenSource (owned by Citrix Systems as of a year back). And speaking of open source projects (strictly speaking...originally proprietary) now owned by companies, I encourage you to also investigate InnoTek's VirtualBox, acquired by Sun Microsystems (and renamed xVM) in February. Version 1 reviews were quite positive, and Sun released v2 mid-last month.

My print article evaluates VMware Fusion v1.1.3, but v2 of the software predictably also went gold mid-last month (a month-plus too late for me to incorporate it in the magazine writeup). Stay tuned for more virtualizion-themed Brian's Brain blog posts to come next week where, among other things, I'll provide in-depth follow-up to my already-published Fusion v2 thoughts. Here's a tantalizing sneak peak to whet your appetite. Remember the single-core virtualization burden (focus on vmware-vmx) that Fusion v1.1.3 put on the MacBook, even with Windows XP at idle?

Well, here's what single-core Fusion v2 'gold' looks like under the same virtualized O/S circumstances:

A greater than 2x reduction in CPU load? Not bad...not bad at all! In next week's posts, I'll also share my hands-on impressions of Wine (specifically Darwine) and Microsoft's now-discontinued Virtual PC for Mac. I'll also share what I know about Parallels' plans for the upcoming Desktop For Mac v4. And, per my usual practice, I'll shell out lots of additional-reading links for you to continue your virtualization education.