The desktop hypervisor world is starting to get interesting again, says Tom Fenton as he goes hands-on with free Orchestration with Kubernetes on Apple.
Tom explains how things shook out and what it means to you after VMware's End User Computing (EUC) division emerged as an independent entity, now operating under the name Omnissa.
Tom tests the desktop hypervisor recently made free for personal use to students, hobbyists and casual users who want to run multiple OSes on a single computer.
Tom steps through the process of downloading, installing and licensing Workstation Pro 17 on his personal laptop.
Tom Fenton explains how this is huge news for the tens of thousands of students, hobbyists and casual users who would like to run multiple instances of OSes on a single computer.
Tom's mini-PC can surf/stream, comes up short with office apps and doesn't do Windows 11, but is perfectly capable of running a thin-client OS in a VDI setup.
In his final series article, Tom puts the nifty little device through all its VDI paces -- and likes what he sees.
In part 3 of his series on the SimplyNUC Moonstone mini-PC, Tom installs VMware Workstation on the device and runs and benchmarks the performance of a small and large Windows 10 VM.
In part 2 of his series, Tom benchmarks the device to have a baseline to compare the virtual machines he will run on it after installing VMware Workstation.
Tom gets his hands on SimplyNUC's most powerful AMD-powered mini-PC, the Moonstone, sticks Workstation on it and declares: "This thing is a beast in a very small package."
Tom does parallel testing of iSCSI and NFS, along with testing NFS SSD VMs, iSCSI SSD VMs, multimedia performance and more.
Tom checks its suitability for the mass storage and protection of his home and lab files and data.
After previous benchmarking tests, Tom attempts to install and run a bare-metal hypervisor on the low-priced, small form-factor PC.
Tom installs Workstation on an ACEMAGIC AD15 Mini PC to benchmark its performance running a small and large Windows 10 VM.
With an i7-1360P processor, 16 GB of RAM and a 512 NVMe device for storage, it should handle the most demanding home and office workloads.