Reccomendations for Emulation.

WiganeseTechSupport

Right so I have upgraded to windows 8.1 and have Hyper-V installed but I want something else for other Operating Systems that won't work with Hyper-V I don't want anything daft or complicated (Qemu) just something that gets the job done (VirtualBox need not apply)

SomeGuy

What exactly do you want to emulate or virtualize? Different tools have different strengths and weaknesses. And some tools are the only game in town for certain OSes or applications.

For example, virtualizing Windows XP and office applications: VirtualBox, VMWare or VirtualPC
For DOS games: DOSBox
For early PC applications and OSes: PCE, PCem, or MESS.
For 68K MacOS 7-8.1: Basillisk II
For 68K MacOS 1-6: VMac
And so on.

Unfortunately, "emulation" is rarely simple.

WiganeseTechSupport

Games,"LogMeIn Support" (I Think you know why), Some betas of Mac OS X.

Anonymous

Sheepshaver will work for 9.0, 9.04 also. Modded Sheepshaver and PearPC work for emulating OSX

stitch

You just ruled out everything besides hyper-v and vmware that's general x86 virtualization. I don't think there's much that VMWare can emulate that Hyper-V can't.

calvinb

With VT, pretty much. VMware might need a bit of poking to run NT 3.51, but it'll run.

WiganeseTechSupport

I dont reallly like Hyper-V its not as fast as VMWare but i dont like its price (Vmware)

stitch

WiganeseTechSupport wrote:

I dont reallly like Hyper-V its not as fast as VMWare

[citation-needed]

calvinb

VMware is more mature and I have heard good things about its speed. However, VT makes it mostly about supporting stuff. VirtIO devices on both hypervisors will speed it up.

I do run ESXi on my home server, but have yet to use Hyper-V.

WiganeseTechSupport

I only Installed Hyper-V as i thought it was going to be good. but i realized its slower than VPC2007

stitch

WiganeseTechSupport wrote:

I only Installed Hyper-V as i thought it was going to be good. but i realized its slower than VPC2007

[citation-needed]

WiganeseTechSupport

I PERSONALLY find it slower. It takes rougly 10 minutes to Install Windows XP on VMWare (When i had the trial) But on Hyper-V It takes +1 Hour with the same ram and hdd space

stitch

You are very much doing something wrong then. Everything you have listed has the ability to utilize your hardware virtualization instructions (VPC 2007, Hyper-V, VirtualBox *and* VMWare). With hardware virtualization you are not emulating things, you are running that VM natively on your processor at native speeds (unless you have a governor configured). The only overhead that would come from running without would be for ring 0 level kernel calls to be translated into userspace calls to run under a VM in protected mode space. This should not cost you more than 2-5 minutes extra on that install however, if that. I doubt the disk image host is at play either if you were happy with VPC 2007 that uses the *same* VHD system Hyper-V does. Different systems? Different disks? VMWare also has an unattended installer thing too that can accelerate things but not by *that* margin.

*shrugs* whatever.

I *PERSONALLY* just think you're spouting things that sound horribly unrealistic because you think you know what you're talking about but you really don't.

WiganeseTechSupport

I only EVER enable VT-X on OS's like Windows 8 never on older ones. I guess thats why it seems slower

calvinb

afaik, Hyper-V only uses VT - it'll never use software virtualization

WiganeseTechSupport

so your saying in my case software is faster then Hardware?

allgoodnamesareused

I... What? Of course not. Software relies on hardware.

Kirk

WiganeseTechSupport wrote:

I PERSONALLY find it slower.

The time which something takes to complete is measurable, and is not subject to opinion.

stitch

WiganeseTechSupport wrote:

so your saying in my case software is faster then Hardware?

allgoodnamesareused wrote:

I... What? Of course not. Software relies on hardware.

urghhh =(

allgoodnamesareused

stitch wrote:

WiganeseTechSupport wrote:

so your saying in my case software is faster then Hardware?

allgoodnamesareused wrote:

I... What? Of course not. Software relies on hardware.

urghhh =(

Sorry, am I wrong? I think that's right, but I might be wrong.

WiganeseTechSupport

just sayin on Hyper-V time seems to drag

stitch

WiganeseTechSupport wrote:

just sayin on Hyper-V time seems to drag

urghhhhhhhhhh =(

BlueSun

My work recently switched from an all ESXi / VMware cluster to an all Hyper-V cluster. I can guarantee you that Hyper-V is not slower than VMware.

Hyper-V, to me, feels a little snappier. But then again, we also upgraded to faster hosts. I'm pretty sure there's a ton of benchmarks out there if you want actual measurable statistics and not subjective feels.

Anonymous

I know this is being picky, but reccomendations is spelled recommendations.

stitch

mousy wrote:

I know this is being picky, but reccomendations is spelled recommendations.

Apparently right-clicking red squiggles and clicking correctly spelled words is too much to ask out of some kids.

Doqtor Kirby

Nowadays I just use VirtualBox for everything. I use to use VPC2K7 and to a lesser extent VMWare. I noticed little difference in the speed of the hypervisor, and settled on VirtualBox solely because of it's ease of use.

stitch wrote:

Apparently right-clicking red squiggles and clicking correctly spelled words is too much to ask out of some kids.

It seems the red squiggles do not appear when typing the topic name. This is an inherent problem with phpBB and not a WW-specific issue.

calvinb

It depends - IE does spell-checking for single line inputs, and in Firefox, it's an about:config option.

BlueSun

Chrome also does spell checking on single line inputs.

As for VirtualBox, it's ok. I like that it's legitimately free and fairly lightweight. However, in my years, I have seen some stability issues with it and some issues which just should not be issues. For example, if you try to close it by using the close option in the jump menu, it doesn't work. I've seen this on various different systems and it's interesting because I've seen it work after an update, but the next launch it will break.

Skora

BlueSun wrote:

Chrome also does spell checking on single line inputs.

As for VirtualBox, it's ok. I like that it's legitimately free and fairly lightweight. However, in my years, I have seen some stability issues with it and some issues which just should not be issues. For example, if you try to close it by using the close option in the jump menu, it doesn't work. I've seen this on various different systems and it's interesting because I've seen it work after an update, but the next launch it will break.

I've had my fair share of Virtualbox issues, and let me tell you BlueSun, you're lucky. I encountered an issue that was present from 4.3.6, to 4.3.10, where any and every DOS/DOS-based operating system i would try would cause Virtualbox to crash, and this would happen immediately after you press the "start" button to start the VM.

Doqtor Kirby

Yeah I've had some issues with VBox before too, but in the end none of them are really so bad as to make me find another hypervisor entirely--they were just little things, such as new Guest Additions disabling seamless for W2K. Although I did run into an issue in 4.3.16 where it would just not start a VM (but it was my antivirus's fault, not vbox).

theotherosproject

I remember at one point VirtualBox kept crashing on my laptop after a clean install -- gave me a weird 0x00000000 error if I tried to fullscreen any VM. But it was temporary.