From the stone age to the future in 6 weeks
Saturday, November 17th, 2007The 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.
