VMware Workstation 8 Tutorials
Introduction / Alternative Solutions pt. 2
Subtitles of the Movie (VMware Workstation 8 / Introduction / Alternative Solutions pt. 2)
Welcome to Part 2 of Alternative Solutions and if you remember from Part 1 if you've already viewed Part 1, you'll know that I'm covering the alternative solutions in virtualization products just simply because, you need to know that they're out there. In Part 1 I talked about the free solutions that you have out there, VirtualBox, VMware Player, those kinds of things and in Part 2 here, I want to talk about the paid applications that are available out there in virtualization. First one is probably the one that everybody tends to gravitate toward first and that is VMware Workstation. Now this is the undisputed leader in desktop virtualization. Now some of you may disagree with me here, that's okay, but almost everywhere you go in, in the corporate world, in enterprise level environments, if there's virtualization going on, you're going to see VMware. Talk to administrators, mention the word VMware and they smile, they, they stand up straight, they talk about all the cool things VMware can do with virtualized machines and making copies of servers and moving them around and all that sort of thing. And Workstation is kind of the client side piece of functionality in there. Now VMware offers a ton of products that are paid applications and we'll talk about those in a separate video but just understand now VMware Workstation is by most accounts, the leader in the industry right now. This supports all kinds of enterprise level functionalities, I kind of alluded to these in Part 1. The ability to clone a machine very quickly and easily, the ability to take multiple snapshots of these things, it's just all kind of cool stuff you can do. You can provide remote access to a virtual machine very easily, a lot of things are just built into the interface, they're designed to minimize workload on the administrators and it's just a really, really cool product. Now this was by the way, a little trivia here, the first virtual machine product to support 3D graphics, by the way it was also the first one to fully implement and support the Windows Arrow Graphics functionalities. And again you can go to VMware.com and get this, something very interesting here. Now I'm going to mention this in this course but understand, this could change, you know, in a week's time. If you go to VMware.com, you can download a free 30 day trial of VMware Workstation and you can bring this thing down and play with it for 30 days at the end of the 30 days when your trial expires it just starts to function as VMware Player. Well what a lot of people find is, is that if you just go download VMware Player and install it, you just get VMware Player and it will never do anything other than those things that VMware Player does. However if you download Workstation and then it expires, it begins to function as VMware Player but it still retains some of those functionalities that Workstation had. This is kind of odd I know, but just play with it on your own and see what happens but VMware really seems to be using these products, VMware Player and VMware Workstation to really market their ideas and their products. Because they have some incredibly strong, seriously enterprise level virtualization products like Sphere and VM View and some other things, we'll talk about those later on in the course as well. Probably the number one paid application out there for the end user, for people who just want to run virtualized environments on their machine, it's going to be VMware Workstation. Now another incredibly popular one is Parallels, now this is best known as a virtualization solution for Apple. If you go into your local computer store, wherever you buy your computers and you say well I'd like a Mac Notebook, but I'm a Windows person or I've got a lot of Windows applications, the first thing they're going to say is Parallels. Parallels will let you run Windows on Apple machines. Now what a lot of people may not have caught up on is the fact that, there is a version of Parallels that will run on Windows on Linux machines and it's a virtualization environment, very, very similar to Workstation or VirtualBox or anything like that. Now this is a, by the way, let me mention this, they also have a mobile version that's out, that provides virtualization for iPhones and iPad. Now this is kind of, I don't want to be negative here but can be kind of quirky and you'll see a lot of less than stellar reviews on the products out there. This came out as a free product, now they've announced it's going to 20 dollars. You can still get it for 4.99 and they're just kind of tending to make everybody mad and disappoint them with this. Some people use this and absolutely love it, so if you're an iPhone, iPad user, go try this, see what you think about it, especially before it goes to 20 bucks. Who knows how long that's going to last but you can also go to Parallels.com and see all of their offerings out there. Now with, with all that going on, that's the two biggest ones as far as paid applications. Now there is one that I want to mention here as a paid virtualization application and that's a product called VMware Fusion. Now that is a VMware product, it is really VMware Workstation for the Mac machine and for example, I've got a Mac Mini, I run VMware Fusion on it and it's, it's blazingly fast, that's one of the things VMware is very popular for. Very efficient operation on their virtual machines and by the way, let me throw this in here, VMware Workstation, VMware Player both run the exact same architecture under the hood. So you get the same performance out of both, VMware Fusion runs fabulously on the Mac, it is extremely popular and again when you walk into the computer store and you mention that hey, I'm a Windows person and I'm moving to Mac and I still got a bunch of Windows stuff. They're going to mention Parallels first and then they're going to mention VMware Fusion. Don't know why it goes that way, I looked at them both and I liked Fusion better, probably because I'm more familiar and more comfortable with VMware. Okay. So if you are a Parallels person, good for you, I've seen it, I've got friends that swear by it, they kind of snicker at me for using Fusion, that's okay. That's the alternative paid solutions that are out there, just wanted you to know that these are out there. I would strongly encourage you to go take a look at them and see which one really fits your needs.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | VMware Workstation 8 |
| Author: | Mark Long |
| SKU: | 34309 |
| ISBN: | 978-1-61866-043-5 |
| Release Date: | 2012-05-04 |
| Duration: | 8 hrs / 99 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
VTC Sign up & Benefits
- Unlimited Access
- 81,350 Video Tutorials (14,200 free)
- Video Available as Flash or QuickTime
- Over 715 Courses
- $30 for One Month Access
- Multi-User Discounts Available
