warezcandy

MWare Workstation enables you to run multiple operating systems on the same computer (think dual-booting without the mess). This article describes my experience with VMWare Workstation 3.1.1, a $299 product.

There are a few reasons you might want to run many OSes on the same computer. They all have to do with saving money, time or hassle (in some cases). Lets look at possible uses of VMWare.
Software development and testing

Youre a software developer writing software for Windows. Although Microsoft is very good at maintaining backwards-compatibility, things are not perfect. At the time of this writing you would probably want to support Windows 95, 98, ME, NT 4, 2000 and XP. This means that you should test your software on at least 6 OSes. In the past that would mean 6 different machines or re-installing the OS a few times. Ouch. With VMWare you only need one computer with the OS of your choice to do the development and initial testing and a few virtual OS installations (running on the same machine under VMWare) for testing.

Or you work with the bleeding-edge version of Gnome. Things are not always rosy and sometimes a snafu makes the whole system fubar and only a re-install from scratch can bring it back to sane state. With VMWare you could go back to a stable version (which you saved earlier in your infinite wisdom) in a few minutes.

Or youre a kernel programmer working on a new file system. File corruption is your daily bread but thanks to VMWare you can now quickly revert to a stable system.