“Thanks to VMWare’s multiplexing capabilities, the guest
operating system runs and behaves as a fully independent and
complete box, interfaced to the host through a virtualized Ethernet
card. If your host is a standalone computer which is not connected
to the Internet, you’ll have to set up networking.”
“Multiplexing also allows users to access all the host operating
system’s other hardware, such as the sound card, video card and
floppy disk drives. However, VMWare admits that the product is not
designed to allow gamers who run Windows NT or Linux to install
Windows 98 and play fast paced 3D games. The developers at VMWare
aim the product toward the developer and IS manager market. But
that doesn’t mean gamers can’t take advantage of 2D and other fast
paced games!”
“How can an operating system be a guest when no partitioning
is required? It’s simple. Unlike dual booting, which requires a
hard drive partition for each operating system, all operating
systems under VMWare reside on a virtual partition, stored as a
file on your real partition. An interesting approach, isn’t
it?”