Anyone here with VMWare Player experience?

[drone]

Before I waste a lot of time for nothing, I was curious if anyone here had experience with the VMWare Player. I'm more interested in how it handles the transition from player-to-host hardware control. For example, does it have a "VMWare" video driver, that hides the actual driver from the software running in the VM?

I will probably run a VM for Linux on may Vista laptop for my own amusement, but for the purposes of this thread I'm more interested in how an older Windows version like XP handles being hosted.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Dunno. Quick Google search reveals that Player ought to support hardware acceleration for graphics as of version 2.5: http://www.vmware.com/support/player25/doc/releasenotes_player250.html
For Linux you probably don't need VMWare, VirtualBox will do the job just fine.

In the meantime I have a question about your signature, is my French that bad (I thought to kill is tuer?) or did Louis write “If I were not playing with games I would die from small animals at a higher level than I am at the moment” or something to that effect?

[drone]

Dunno. Quick Google search reveals that Player ought to support hardware acceleration for graphics as of version 2.5: http://www.vmware.com/support/player25/doc/releasenotes_player250.html
For Linux you probably don't need VMWare, VirtualBox will do the job just fine.
Basically, I'm interested in getting older games working in an XP install through a VM. Looks like 2.5 supports DirectX9. I also wonder if this could be used to bypass the nVidia problems and other issues we see with MTW on modern systems. This would depend on how VMWare defines the hardware to the guest OS and how it translates the DirectX calls to the hardware drivers on the host.


In the meantime I have a question about your signature, is my French that bad (I thought to kill is tuer?) or did Louis write “If I were not playing with games I would die from small animals at a higher level than I am at the moment” or something to that effect?
:laugh4:
When Strike and Louis did their profile switcharoo a while back, I took my old SFTS quote and put it through the Google translator. My French is so rusty I can't tell if Google lied to me or not.

[Xiahou]

We use a lot of VMware products where I work... but never Player. It looks like 3.0 and above might work for older games though. Definitely let us know what you find out.

Also, if you have an XP machine sitting around, use vCenter Converter to virtualize it without needing a clean XP install- that's a great product. :yes:

[drone]

I just worked on a project where we used Player with a RHELinux guest on a Win7 box. It got me thinking about the possibilities...

How does vCenter Converter (and VMWare in general) handle XP licensing? Most businesses will have an VLK license so it shouldn't be an issue for them, but I'm assuming I need to get a fresh valid key if I want my virtual XP to work without the WGA hassles. I assume how the VMWare player presents the "hardware" setup to the guest XP install affects activation, another reason I'm asking how the system setup is presented to XP through the virtual machine.

[Xiahou]

With the products I've worked on, (ESX/ESXi, vSphere, ect) the VM always presents virtual hardware. However, player sounds like a rather different creature. Most of the virtualizations we did using vCenter Converter were Win2k3 servers and they all went without a hitch., but like you said, we have a VLK.

Honestly, if an XP virtualization goes even half as smooth as the 2k3 ones did, you're risking nothing by giving it a try. :shrug: