OT: Killer App

["Don McAllister" <donmc@xxxxxxx>]

Guys (and Gals),

I know some of you lot have got PCs and Servers in great abundance, but
some
of us lesser mortals have to make do with only three or four :-). That
being
said, I'm always struggling to load new or different OS on my beasties
basically cause I hate multi boot configurations.

Stumbled across VMWare. This allows you to run virtual machines (VM) on
your
existing Windows 2000, NT or Linux boxes down to the level of having
individual bios setups for each VM. The virtual machines allows you to host
various OS's in isolation which can be suspended and dumped to a file for
virtually instant reload. You can have multiple VMs with different OS's
simulataneously. They all share the host ethernet card and create a bridged
network. They can all access the host peripherals.

The suprising thing is it works brilliantly. I've always wanted to dabble
with Linux but didn't have a spare machine. With VMWare, I created a VM and
loaded Red hat Linux 6.2 out of the box. Ran Netscape and accessed the
Internet through Linux no problem. I then created another VM and loaded
Windows 98 SE, all hosted on a Windows 2000 Pro box and three OSs running
simultaneously with decent performance. VMware provides additional tools to
enable copy & paste between environments and provide enhanced graphics
support,

30 day evaluation copies can be downloaded from www.vmware.com . They also
appear to do server versions for production systems to consolidate multiple
servers onto single machines.

Sorry if this sounds like an advert but I'm genuinely impressed with the
product and might even stump up the $199 to buy a copy. This may be a first
!!

No association with the company blady blah !!!!

Cheers
Don