Geeks in Paradise | Brian Chee » Affordable Virtualization

July 21, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Affordable Virtualization

TAGS: Industry Trends

My lab is littered with computers used during software trials that are in need of being regenned. While Norton Ghost has been truly wonderful for freshening a machine, I've always wanted to have a test machine on demand for quickly testing things.

Several years ago I stumbled over VMWare under Linux and liked it enough that I whipped out my credit card. After the sticker shock, I found it a great way to prototype my new Linux Servers and after a few rev's my Windows servers. However at a price tag that rivaled a low end desktop computer, I didn't go beyond that first license.

However, this has changed...previously Virtual PC from Microsoft limited me to a maximum of 10mb/second on the network, no multicast and limited virtual resources. Virtual Server R2 however is a significantly different beast. With MUCH closer ties to the metal, you can now create virtual networks, and attach the virtual machine's (VM) logical devices (ie. CDROM/DVD, floppy, serial port, etc) to physical ports and devices on the host machine. My biggest surprise was when the Debian netinstall was able to do a hardware probe and installed perfectly. So while the host is running at 1280x1024x32color for video, I purposely dropped it down to 800x60x16bit color and gave it a 16gb virtual disk. Everything worked, Debian partitioned the drive, and now reports exactly the physical conditions I gave it.

So the next time you need to do a test drive on a new release of an OS or application, think very hard about the newly free Microsoft Virtual Server R2 (x32 or x64) or the renamed VMWare Server (ex. GSX Server) from EMC.

Posted by Brian Chee on July 21, 2006 01:27 PM

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