From the stone age to the future in 6 weeks
November 17th, 2007 | Published in virtualization | 5 Comments
The day I walked into VMware it started. It didn’t hit me right away, but by the end of the day I was surrounded by it: virtualization. It ran on my development server (ESX 3), it ran on my laptop (Workstation 6). Everybody in the company seems to run one of our products on some machine of theirs, whether it’s ESX, Workstation, or our Fusion product (which I look forward to trying very soon).
Virtualization isn’t new to me. I’ve been using it for 4 years, but mostly on IBM mainframes. What is new is being surrounded by it. All of my work has been in virtual machines and you quickly come to recognize the power of taking an entire system and transferring it from your workstation to your laptop, or letting your teammates capitalize on your labor and get copies of a VM you spent days setting up and tweaking.
Yesterday I found myself wanting to use Drupal for a new project, because someone is always talking about it (and happened to coauthor a series of articles on using it). But Ubuntu doesn’t have the latest release and I was reluctant to install Apache, MySQL, and Drupal on my desktop PC.
What did I do? I downloaded the VMware Player, snagged a minimal Ubuntu server appliance from the Virtual Appliance Marketplace, and installed it all there. Problem solved. In about 15 minutes even.
I’m now wishing that I had a beefier PC at home to run additional VMs. And no, I have not had any Kool-Aid or taken any blue pills. It’s easy to win someone over when the product is good.
November 20th, 2007 at 11:04 am (#)
Have you played with Xen, KVM, and friends as well? I’ve used VMware and Xen both quite a bit. I would recommend giving a lighter virtualization a spin.
I wouldn’t say vmware is a cure all for all virtualization purposes.
but then, I haven’t tried all their products, so perhaps they DO have a cure all :-b
November 20th, 2007 at 1:32 pm (#)
I have not played with Xen or KVM. I don’t have the hardware for KVM and I’m not really interested in changing the setup on my personal box, so I’m limited to hosted virtualization options.
Also, I need to be careful when it comes to viewing source for other virtualization products.
November 23rd, 2007 at 6:57 pm (#)
I agree that vmware products rock. They save us a bunch of time.
November 28th, 2007 at 9:37 pm (#)
Kyle,
I’m surprised that you’re using “older” VMware products, like workstation and player. Why not Server? Since it’s just as free and I’m pretty sure more functional. I’m not 100% on the image portability though.
I think you’re right that it’s nice to see such a pervasive use of an enabling technology (that’s so enabling exactly because it’s so pervasive).
I’ve been thinking that as soon as I can get my home server straightened up (which will take some effort) I’ll get a few more appliances going at home… but now you made me think that I need a better machine
December 3rd, 2007 at 9:39 am (#)
Jay,
The desktop PC that I’ve been running player on at home is a 1.7 GHz Athlon XP w/768 MB of RAM and it seems to run okay. The main issue I’ve had is running Player and Eclipse at the same time (developing outside of the VM and publishing to it), because Eclipse wants more RAM (I’ve got a lot of plugins and features installed depending on what language or toolkit I’m using).
As for Workstation vs. Server, the beta of Server 2.0 was not out yet and WS6 is significantly better than Server 1.0 (see http://www.virtualization.info/lab/VMwareWKS60_vs_VMwareSVR10.pdf). And I ended up using Player on my home machine because I could easily get Gutsy packages for it (and Player 2.0.x was also better than Server at the time).