Virtual machine technologies for PCs have really matured in recent years
and can now offer a fast, stable solution for people who require more than one
computer but that don’t need the processing power of multiple computers. The
two primary virtual machine technologies currently available are Virtual PC
from Microsoft Corporation and VMWare Workstation from VMWare Inc.
Functionally the two products are very similar, both being able to run Win-
dows and non-Windows operating systems. One difference is that VMWare
also runson non-Windows hosts such as Linux, allowing Linux systems to run
versions of Windows (or other Linux installations) inside a virtual machine.
Both products have full support for performing kernel-debugging using either
WinDbg or NuMega SoftICE. Figure 4.10 shows a VMWare Workstation win-
dow with a Windows Server 2003 system running inside it.Figure 4.10 A screenshot of VMWare Workstation version 4.5 running a Windows Server
2003 operating system on top of a Windows XP host.128 Chapter 4