Questions about vmware workstation

[jDSX]

I have a few operating systems I would like to emulated inside of my current windows. I have two questions I tried googling them and got nothing.

1. Is emulating guest OSs stable enough to do everyday things in it? Or for a long time period? If not how long do I have?

2. Can the host OS become messed up if the guest OS gets infected with viruses/malware or certain OS files become deleted/corrupt will it do so in the host?

Note too I am limited to the ram I have so in this case I will be using no more than 1gb of ram for each guest.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

1. Yeah, for the most part you can use VMs for daily use just fine, as long as you don't try and do intensive tasks in one or the other at the same time.
2. It could happen, yes, if the virus could spread itself via networking (or other means, where the host and guest OS are connected like through COM and such). As long as you're as careful with your guest OS as you are your host OS, you should be fine.

When you say you won't be using more than 1GB of RAM, do you mean you're going to allocate 1GB of RAM for each guest, or you only have 1GB of RAM? I'm fairly certain it's the former, but of course it's always good to make sure.

If it's the former, that should be ok enough for basic everyday tasks like web browsing and basic office work, depending on what OS you want to use.

 

[jDSX]

When you say you won't be using more than 1GB of RAM, do you mean you're going to allocate 1GB of RAM for each guest, or you only have 1GB of RAM? I'm fairly certain it's the former, but of course it's always good to make sure.

If it's the former, that should be ok enough for basic everyday tasks like web browsing and basic office work, depending on what OS you want to use.

Only to allocate 1gb of ram to each..maybe 1.5 if it really needs it. I guess with my other questions, I need to mess with it and see if I can do it safely without it effecting the host (or in this case my main OS) in a bad way. I would like to know too if I need any extra drivers especially with older os like windows XP and abandon betas?

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Generally the guest OS won't be effecting the host too much, so it should be safe enough.

As for drivers and such, VMware always supplies basic drivers needed for OS's it supports like Windows XP and such, and you shouldn't run into too many compatibility issues for some of the more basic hardware. For abandonware, you might have a more difficult time with it, but IIRC VMware won't install unsupported OS's regardless, so if you try to install PoopyButtsOS from 1999, you'll run into some issues. OS's built off from various popular Linux kernels should install fine, though. I think they have a list of compatible OS's and stuff somewhere on their site

 

[jDSX]

Huh.. I did see some users on youtube showing off windows longhorn and I believe neptune, they must of used something else. I'll take a look into it.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Longhorn might work, if you set it to install like an XP installation, and Neptune might with it set as Windows 2000.

But as they're not officially supported, it might have a lot of compatibility issues or might not run.