5 ms·
> Surprised this is so new to people - ESXi has been free for years > Using VMware Fusion in this way does sound useful in that it sort of replicates the exper
by irq 5y ago
> Surprised this is so new to people - ESXi has been free for years
> Using VMware Fusion in this way does sound useful in that it sort of replicates the experience you get with vSphere
VMware's first big product, long before ESX (and later ESXi), was VMware Workstation, released in 1999, which provided x86 virtualization and ran on (and virtualized) both Windows and Linux. It was the first commercial product to easily enable people to run Windows without having to leave their Linux environment. VMware Fusion is essentially the same product, just the spiritual successor to that product that runs on macOS (along with a bunch of modern optimizations, of course) going back to 1999.
- mobilio 5y agoI'm using second product - Connectix VirtualPC (for Windows) because at this time this was only that can run on Windows98SE. VMW require NT/2K at this time. But i couldn't migrate to NT platform due project limitations. VPC works flawless in version 4, but for version 5 they require NT platform too.
- watersb 5y agoConnectix VirtualPC started as a Mac product. I installed Windows 95 on a Mac with VirtualPC back in... 1995. All 26 floppies of it. Installation done, it rebooted the virtual box, and I had to go to a meeting. Cane back an hour or so later, and it had just finished booting up. Good times. Then Microsoft bought them, and I think afterwards the Mac version was no longer supported. (PowerPC was a consortium of Motorola, IBM, and Apple, and was made out of silicon... so technically, that would be "Intel Virtualization on Apple Silicon". :-) )
- JonathonW 5y agoVirtual PC on Mac got at least one major release after Microsoft bought Connectix, but that was right around the same time as Apple's transition to Intel. MS apparently didn't consider it worthwhile to port VPC to run natively on Intel OSX (which would've been a pretty big change in direction for the product-- moving it to native virtualization like on Windows rather than the dynamic recompilation approach that the Mac version used).
- mobilio 5y agoAlso at this time processors for Windows comes with virtualization extensions - VT-x and AMD-V. So Microsoft focused on making their product better just for Windows. Later they're expanding into Virtual Server and famous "Windows XP Mode" on Win7. At the end everything was merged into Hyper-V.
- Melatonic 5y agoEven though I do not use it professionally I think Hyper-V is very underrated - it is built in for free to many versions of Windows 10 and is pretty easy to get a VM running even by the average power user type person.