The End?

That would be more like a hypervisor. VMWare installs inside of Windows. Hypervisors are something that were used quite some time ago, mostly in the Unix world. I still don't know that you'd get the same performance, but I'm sure it's better than VMWare and the like.

I don't think VMWare will ever be as fast as the host system, since every instruction will have to be essentially made twice (once on the host, then translated to the VM).

The more realistic options for casual home use are the virtualization programs like ShadowUser, BufferZone, DefenseWall, GeSWall, and so on. I wouldn't count on any of them being a panacea, though. As the pauldotcom podcast pointed out there is a big difference between two machines separated by some memory space and two machines separated by a physical air gap. You can pretty much bet that they will be breached at some point.

 

Notok,
My understanding is that if I create a virtual machine and allocate all of the system resources to that virtual machine, it will respond indistinguishably as fast as if the virtual machine were not a virtual machine.

 

Nope. You are essentially installing an entire second computer inside Windows. So when your browser requests something of the processor, it requests it from the virtual processor, which in turn translates that request to the physical processor, and then translates the output back to the browser. It may not be exactly twice the work, but it's still quite a bit more. The faster the virtualization is, the more it is tied into the host operating system, which is why DefenseWall is faster than BufferZone (which has the virtual file system), etc.

This also means that you must have TWO licenses for Windows, which is what Peter was saying.

 

The guest operating system is just a couple of (big) files on your harddrive. You have to have windows installed in order to install the program VMware, and WMvare creates the file (the guest OP) . You can not install WMvare without a host (Windows XP for example)
But you can export the guest to another drive and import it after you have reinstalled windows (the host OS) and Vmware in case of harddrive failure.
I hope I understood the questions right

 

As far as I know, you are right. I have not seen such option in VMware. But then again I have only used it to install other operating systems.

I would like to have the option to clone my host into a guest though. It is a pain to install everything from scratch to get an identical system to try beta software on (or malware if you want) and then you have to keep the "cloned" guest updated ie: install everything you install in the host.

But if you are testing other OS it is good, but not merely for testing new software. It is much easier with FDISR, Rollback and similar software. So VMware is not the end of FDISR imho. Not yet anyway. But if they incorporate features of instant recovery programs, like the things I mention above, it might be.

 

Again I've never used this stuff, but we are obviously not on the same page here. I have copied a quote directly from the Security Now! podcast # 53 with Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson.

 

ESX is a server application made for large corporations, and is priced accordingly. I don't know that it would be suitable for everyday use (it's not made for it), and you still wouldn't get the same performance.

Vista will have a hypervisor as well, but only in the enterprise version.

 

FirstDefense and VMWare co-exist here, I'm very surprised not more people here use vms. I use workstation, ESX, XEN...work and surf vm all the time.
Anyone looking at this I would recommend the free player and now server and explore the appliances.
VMWare : http://www.vmware.com/
Community : http://www.vmware.com/community/index.jspa
Appliance info : http://www.vmware.com/appliances/
...and directory http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/