run two VMs (VMWare Wst and Virtualbox) parallel at the same time

Question

Is it possible to have two Virtual machines, one VMWare Workstation, one Virtualbox running at the same on one host?

Or does this give strange behaviour?

Solution 1

It is possible.

The major caveat I've run into is that usually only one hypervisor can use the hardware acceleration features offered by modern motherboards/chipsets, so one hypervisor may have to run in software virtualization mode, which can limit you VM guest choices.

Then you have to watch out for other resource sharing, like networking, CPUs and RAM. Since one hypervisor will not be aware of what the other is doing, they can't properly make dynamic adjustments to their guests' recourse usage based on load/need of the guest VMs. So you're much more likely to run into bottlenecks and resource exhaustion during usage.

Depending on the host OS and the hypervisors, you may have to try a few different hypervisor combinations until you find ones that can co-exist at all.

The best bet is to not mix hypervisors on a single host. Pick a single hypervisor stack, and convert all VMs to that single format and use it to run all your VMs.

Solution 2

You will have problems with one or both.

I have 4 VMware VMs running ok but lost network connectivity after I installed Virtualbox. In additional, virtualbox only allows me to create 32bit VMs.

VMware WS 11 does not even start if I have Hyper-V installed on my Windows 10 PC.

So, pick one.

Solution 3

It is perfectly possible. I have both Hyper-V and VMWare workstation running on a server at the office for trialling various solutions and they work ok.

There are come caveats around things like networking - it is always best to have multiple Network cards and make sure that you assign a different Network card toyour hyperv switch than to your vmware interface nic.

There will also potentially be competition for resources - firing up multiple VMs can be very CPU and RAM and Disk intensive - but if your hardware is up to the job, they can coexist.

Comments

[Scorpion99]

yes , it is possible ,I already try it before.

[user1343503]

This answer worked for me.