What is advantage and disadvantage of VMware?

Answer 1

The main advantage is that you don't have to buy two computers, and you don't have to stand up from one computer and walk to the other (or buy a KVM switch). The only disadvantages are that they are really slow, and not quite as stable.

Advantages

• Increase the hardware utilization of your machines
• Decrease capital and operating costs
• High availability
• You can run other programs in a VM that may not necessarily be in the same OS as the host machine (e.g. running Windows or Mac OS X VM on a Linux host machine, and vice versa)
• Some VM solutions allow you to save machine states that will allow you to revert back to a previous state should an error occur
• Generally VMs are somewhat isolated from the host machine in the case of infection by malware, the host will not be affected

Disadvantages

• If the host is down, the VM will be inaccessible
• Increased memory and processor usage as part of overhead introduced by the VM
• With the statement of the VM being "isolated", it also depends on how you configure your machine. If your VM has stuff like shared clipboard/file folders or if there's a feature that allows hardware passthrough (available to a select amount of hardware) it may still expose your host machine to the same threats as if you will with a VM.

Answer 2

advantages:

• quickly configurable
• exchangable
• of great use in cloud computing

disadvantages:

• overhead
• poor software support

Answer 3

Windows utilises unused hard drive space as RAM to speed up system performance. I don't know of any disadvantage of using virtual memory.

Answer 4

http://www.sysprobs.com/disadvantages-virtualization-opinion