Virtualisation

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Soldato
Joined
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[I dunno if this belongs in this forum, or elsewhere (but I couldn't think of where else to put it).]

At what stage are the latest VMs? It's been a while (2-3 years) since I've played with them last. After hearing aobut all the hardware support for virtualisation over the last few years, have any VMs managed to have full 3D support yet? (ie let the guest OS have the same ability with regards to the GPU as if that OS was running natively?)
 
This is probably better in here

VMs, unless you're using dedicated hardware, aren't really supposed to be used for 3D stuff, normally just running servers/clients with general apps on them, since you don't usually just run 1 VM, you run a load of them, which is very demanding...

Not sure on their actual capabilities however.
 
Well, VMs have two uses, one is for servers, one is for workstations.

3D support is important for workstation use, I know plenty of development companies that force the use of a VM on the workstation. However these tend to be software, based ones, rather than graphics development ones.

Even for home use having 3D support will be good, allowing me to run two different guest operating systems (linux and windows on a linux host) at same time on same machine (and no, I do not want to run Windows as host - too many overheads).
 
Depends on the gfx drivers VMWare produce for the hypervisor. As using 3D gfx is not really what virtualisation is about there is no support for it in VMWare Workstation anyway. Maybe this is different on the Apple side of things.
 
Been doing some more reading regarding latest VM stuff (as I said, I haven't kept up with this for a good 2 or 3 years). Seems VMWare are working on 3d support, however it's still very much software based rather than giving the guest direct access to the host hardware :(
 
Korduo said:
GPU on servers are pretty weak? Even if guests are able to talk directly to the hardware it would be very slow?
Click to expand...

Yer, but VMs are not targeted only at servers now, there are a lot of corporates that use VMs on the desktop.
 
Fair enough, I guess it will be good to see the guests talking directly to the video hardware on workstations.

Not used VMware Workstaion since 4.5, back then it was for testing and training. but been using MS VS because of work. Now they are going VMware, means we have to learn VMware.
 
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