VMware, parallels, Win & Linux

The context:
A business has a samba server happily serving up all it's file needs.
It is time for new hardware, plus there is a need for MSSQL server (may
be dumb, but a proprietary app needs the MS version). We expect to go
with VMs on the new hardware.

My experiments:
I've been using VMware for months and find that it works great! In terms
of disaster recovery, I love that I can take a saved image and drop it
into any machine with vmware and be back running. Lately I've been
experimenting somewhat with parallels. Like vmware, it happily installs
with linux or windows (and in parallel's case, also mac) as the host OS.
By the quirks of nature, I have vmware on an XP box and parallels on a
linux box. I don't care about the money difference (we'd pay for either
one), but I am interest in performance, flexibility, reliability. Of the
two boxes in question, the linux one is the weaker (Sempron 2500+ and
only 512 MB RAM). Ubuntu runs fine and snappy on it. So I loaded up
parallels and tried something lightweight - I installed a copy of
Windows 98, asking only for 96 MB of RAM. I find that it crawls on my
linux box. VMware on the windows box zips along. XP, heck, even Vista is
smoother as a VM on top the XP box than Win98 is under parallels.

My question:
Has anyone else done any comparing? Is parallels slower in your
experience, or is my hardware really the issue? Could it be the linux
config or tuning? Ideally I should install both vmware and parallels on
the linux box (or even both machines) to do better comparisons, but I'd
be delighted to hear any real world experiences any of you might have.

cheerio,
        Les...
Received on Mon Sep 25 20:01:50 2006