According to this article at news.com VMWare is now going to make their GSX Server product free. Now I am not sure what effect this will have on the osx86 community really, but if I may present a theory here....

I don't know how many of you have run a VWWare server, but let me tell you, compared to Virtual PC, it FLIES! Now its been a while since I played around with it, but the last time I built a GSX box, it rocked! I built a micro-server using a Shuttle Micro case and a micro-ATX board. It had a 2 Ghz P4 CPU, 4 Gb of RAM, a single serial ATA drive. Now the machine was needed for software developers for the company I was working for to be able to have isolated development areas. I loaded Windows 2003 w/ Terminal Services loaded, and then the GSX server. We were able to have about 4 developers work off each box, connected via Remote Desktop Client, each one running his own isolated OS and "drive" for his development work. It could run 4 sessions of Windows XP, and barely show a hint of drag.
Add on to that the newer mobos, ram, chipsets, and new virtualization technology that is built into the new Intel chips (which GSX does take advantage of) and I think this community just got one hell of a boost! Take a 3 Ghz machine, load a barebones linux and gsx server, you have a WONDERFUL testing environment, as well as a way of possibly bypassing the EFI through emulation!

Just my thoughts, would be happy to hear what others think.

That's a really interesting idea. It will be interesting to see how 10.4.4 runs in VMware (if there is any difference).

OS X under Vmware Server beta 3 was really slow for me. It's a bit faster in Vmware Workstation 5.5 but really slow there as well. And what I can understand Vmware Server will replace Server GSX so it would be faster right? People have said in various places that Vmware is a lot faster than VPC. It's really the opposite for me. For example the slax livecd really flies in Parallels Workstation and are pretty fast in VPC 2004 but is really slow in Vmware Server beta and workstation 5.5.

I wonder if you have loaded PPC version of Mac OSX 10.4. or
the x86 one.

I thought that one would be much faster.




I should have enquired about installation with VmWare on an AMD machine too.

PPC version will not run under any of these VMs...