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I have played around with virtualization a little. But I wanted to dive in a little deeper. Soooo, what better way to do that than pick up some free software (Ubuntu and VirtualBox!) and have at it? That’s exactly what I did and I thought I would share my initial impressions.
Now, what the heck is virtualization?, you ask. Well, virtualization is hardware abstraction software that virtualizes a machine. Ewkay. Now in more plain english. Virtualization software allow you to run multiple machines with one machine. You can run Vista, XP, Ubuntu, Fedora Core, etc. on a Windows, Linux, or Mac platform. I haven’t tried running VB on Mac however. For instance, I have VB (VirtualBox) running on Ubuntu 8.0.4. I have Windows XP, Vista, and ubuntu server that I can run on the desktop. Pretty cool huh. Well, it gets even cooler. So, why in the world would you want to do this? Testing is a good answer. With virtualization you make a virtual machine and save the state of the machine at install. Then you can install, hack, and generally destroy the machine. Once it’s mangled or ubootable, simply revert the virtual machine back and you’re good to go. How’s that for nice? No need to reinstall. A simple click and you’re back in business with a fresh machine. Also, you can change ram and video memory on the fly. Simply power down the virtual machine and change your requirements. But what about disk space? Well, you can have VB dynamically change it to fit. But there is a limit, as I found out. And once you hit that limit, you are kind of stuck. Well, you can get creative and use some linux tools like dd or dcfldd to copy that image to another partition. But that’s for a later post. VB also has some cool “seamless” functionality. If you add the additional guest apps on the virtual machine, you can see some of that in action. It will allow you to move your mouse over the machine without any need to click in and out of the machine. You can also drag and drop files out of the machine. Networking is great in the virtual network as it supported natting, guest host interface sharing, etc. Shared folders can be readily accessed across hosts. There is an interesting issue in Vista where network drivers are an issue. If you run into this problem, please see John Paulett’s post on using Vista with Virtual Box. It address the problem with network card drivers with Vista on Virtual Box. That helped me out. If someone has experience with their enterprise edition, I would be interested to know how you implementing it. How are you connecting users to the vm’s? Also, how are you implementing it on the network side of things? What can I say, I’m curious! Here’s a video on setting up VB and an XP Virtual Machine on Ubunut:
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