Abstract
Virtualization has been the hype today. Business tend to shift on virtualization to be able to keep with the demands and trends in business. A technology coming with virtualization is the increasing number of virtual platforms vendors available, but of the several hundreds, three brands stand out, These are BootCamp, VMWare, and Parallels. This paper tries to identify the strengths and weaknesses of these virtual platforms and finds out what is best to be implemented for Windows 7 platform.
Introduction/Background
Virtualization has been the hype today. It has proven to be beneficial among businesses as they are able to run their applications and consolidate these at the same time with minimal usage of IT infrastructure which later on leads them a more cost-efficient running of their services. Likewise, the implementation of such technology improves work-load balancing in the organization, provisioning and deployment and enhance resiliency since information can be easily moved from one virtual server to another without losing important data. (Withers, 2013)
With the extent of virtualization among businesses, several virtualization platforms also emerged. These virtualization platforms are software packages that try to imitate the capabilities and performance of whole physical computer machine. It is like a having a single physical computer but having several virtual computers in it. In today’s world, computer scientist have somewhat made it a standard they are able to run in multiple platform machines.
Of the hundreds of companies developing these virtualization platforms three companies or products stand up. These are bootcamp, VMware and Parallels. Bootcamp is a product of Apple which is basically developed to answer the dilemma of running Windows on Mac. Generally, reviewers of the product have said that since it is specially made for the purpose of being able to use Windows environment in your Mac computer, it works as if you’re running using the machines resources and not on a virtual mode. It is stable and is capable to support a wide variety of peripherals compared to other virtual platforms available on the market that supports the running of windows on Mac. Further, setting it up is not a problem as a guided set-up process is available and all drivers required are present. (apple.com)
The current version, BootCamp 5 supports Microsoft Windows 8 (64-bit), Microsoft Windows 8 Pro (64-bit), Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit), Microsoft Windows 7 Professional (64-bit), Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) however, the older version is capable of supporting lower versions of Windows. However, one limitation of the product is that it is not capable of directly supporting upgrades to newer versions. The usual reinstallation process must be made.
VMWare on the other hand is on top of the list of virtualization OS available. On December 3, 2013, VMWare’s market share is 80.06% (Google Finance). It has been widely known among the virtualization world as the most trusted visualization platform, the best platform for Business-critical applications and reduced total cost of ownership. Some of its strength is its capability of support secure and reliable hypervisor which deleted its dependence on the underlying operating system, minimizing its code requirement. To ensure business continuity, this platform has a failover protection feature which enables it to identify management network failures. Other features include being fault tolerance even on downtimes, provides data protection through its fast backup mechanisms and complete recovery, and capability to migrate virtual files to other locations and resources in case of unplanned downtimes that may affect the normal operation of the company. It has also features such as live resource expansion, replication and site recovery management. (http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmware_advantage.pdf)
As proof of their increasing support and utilization of business-critical workload, table 1 below shows their top VMWare customers for the past four years.
1Source: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmware_advantage.pdf
VMWare is capable of supporting almost all operating systems available. Its latest version available on the market vSphere4 is capable of supporting both infrastructure and application services. Particularly, it features advanced memory management which includes increasing memory utilization even to the point of exceeding the physical memory through its virtual memories, transparent page sharing which enhances the utilization of available memory, memory ballooning, which utilizes inactive or idle machines virtual memories, and network offload that successfully reduces the CPU overhead which optimizes its networking performance. (http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/key_features_vsphere.pdf)
Another key feature is its advanced resource management capability which increases the service levels to application software or other software that are currently needing additional resources. It also features scalability where memory can be resized or upscaled depending on the need even if there is no additional physical memory available. One key feature that makes it standout from other virtualization platforms available on the market is its interoperability. It supports several operating systems and platforms whether these are MAC, HP or other hardware available in the market.
If VMWare specializes on running virtualization platforms on servers and bigger machines, parallels on the other hand provides numerous choices for cross-platform applications for desktop computers. Like bootcamp, it specializes or leans towards the installation of other operating systems on your Mac computers. Its current version, the parallels desktop 9 for MAC currently supports the installation of Windows 8 and earlier versions of Windows. (http://www.parallels.com/) Several reviews of experts say that, although VMware is good, when running Windows on MAC, parallels have been observed to perform better because of faster results.
Conclusion
Of the three virtualization platforms and their performance to Windows 7, and after careful analysis and readings of reviews of several computer experts, I would say I would vouch for BootCamp since this is specifically made for Windows running on MAC but of course this still depends on the needs you have or the platform. If the base platform is not MAC, then obviously, VMWare would be the logical choice. All of these platforms supports internet connection on the virtual machines.
The choice of which virtualization platform would one use or not depends on the needs of the user. One cannot decide outright what specific platform to use without taking consideration the needs, the hardware and the software that will be used. Ideally, a specific software can be the best choice but practically, it may not be. Before making the decision, careful analysis must still be done to ensure that what you purchase will meet the requirements set for.
References:
Withers, Simon (2013). Why Virtualization and Cloud Computing Work Together. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/sungardas/2013/10/28/why-virtualization-and-cloud-computing-work-better-together/
http://www.serverwatch.com/trends/article.php/3877576/Top-10-Virtualization-Technology-Companies.htm
http://www.apple.com/support/bootcamp/
https://www.google.com.ph/search?q=common+virtualization+platforms+&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&gws_rd=cr&ei=-V6eUpHOC4ewkAXozoHwBA#q=market+share+of+VMware&rls=org.mozilla:en-US%3Aofficial
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmware_advantage.pdf
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/key_features_vsphere.pdf
http://www.parallels.com/
