Fast, Free Virtualization Software...

I guess, like me, many developers in an MS shop with a casual need for running software in a Virtual Machine use MS Virtual PC 2004. I've been using it and have been satisfied with the fact that I don't have to use different physical machines. After VMWare's announcement that they are going to give away there server version for free I finally got to install it. It's been a while since the announcement and I'm sorry I didn't try it before because it rocks! I'm not going to try to write up a comparison. Mostly because I seriously don't think Virtual PC deserves to be included in the equation. In addition there are many comparisons out there. I'm only going to point out one feature that just blew me away. Performance! VMWare is really fast.

What did confuse me was two closely related packages of VMWare's virtualization software. One is the VMWare Workstation edition (189$) and the other is the free server edition. I found this comparison matrix which gave some good insight, and this blog post also adds some additional arguments for either.

Oh, just one last thing. VMWare Server imported my .vmc files so I didn't need to spend hours setting things up.

Happy virtualization!