Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on September 16, 2006 09:34 AM
I run VMWare a lot, mostly for work and mostly for Windows. The key things are that I can have one physical machine but juggle many different configurations. Like from my one Windows XP laptop I can boot up a VM of Windows Server 2003, Chinese Windows XP, or any of a half-dozen plain Windows XP installs. I keep 5 XP VMs paused with different releases and variations of our product, so I can quickly switch between them to trouble-shoot a problem. I can work with the product and hack it up to replicate a customer's environment or any customizations. Then when it's all wrecked, I can switch back to a clean snapshot before I messed with it.
I don't really use VMWare too much for Linux/Solaris/BSD these days, but I do keep a few around. I did a P2V (physical to virtual -- think of using Norton Ghost to a VM) migration of my old dual-P2 Redhat 9 box just so I could save one of my favorite workhorse environments before the hardware gave out. I keep a Redhat Enterprise and a SuSE Enterprise VM for when I can't get to our testing lab. I keep the latest OpenBSD around on a VM and sometimes copy it to another machine if I need to fire up a secure server to ssh into.
At home I use VMWare for 3 things. I test out new live cd ISOs for fun. I use one to browse the pron / test downloads so I can roll back all my browser history, bad cookies, malware, and other crap that I get even with Firefox. Finally, I have a VMWare image set up for work in case I don't bring my laptop home, it dies, I'm too lazy to get it out, etc. I can fire it up and tunnel in without opening my whole home machine up to the work network and BOFHs. Isolation is cool.
We're in the process of setting up two VMWare ESX servers in our testing lab to migrate our 30 or so Windows and Linux testing servers. We generally need to keep 3 versions of our software available for testing and on Windows that's pretty much one version per machine. Multiply that by 4 versions of Windows. On Linux it's a little better, but we generally have to support at least 4 versions of Linux on Intel, more once we really go 64-bit. Out of those 30 or so machines, we're usually only actively using maybe 7 of them in a testing cycle, so one quad Xeon running VMWare ESX handles that load nicely. Especially since the lab is almost entirely made up of what I call sh*tboxes -- hand-me-downs from developers. The average box is a P3-500 with 256 or 512 megs of RAM.
Learn about Linux
Download Linux
Get Linux help
Re:What's the advantage?
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on September 16, 2006 09:34 AMI don't really use VMWare too much for Linux/Solaris/BSD these days, but I do keep a few around. I did a P2V (physical to virtual -- think of using Norton Ghost to a VM) migration of my old dual-P2 Redhat 9 box just so I could save one of my favorite workhorse environments before the hardware gave out. I keep a Redhat Enterprise and a SuSE Enterprise VM for when I can't get to our testing lab. I keep the latest OpenBSD around on a VM and sometimes copy it to another machine if I need to fire up a secure server to ssh into.
At home I use VMWare for 3 things. I test out new live cd ISOs for fun. I use one to browse the pron / test downloads so I can roll back all my browser history, bad cookies, malware, and other crap that I get even with Firefox. Finally, I have a VMWare image set up for work in case I don't bring my laptop home, it dies, I'm too lazy to get it out, etc. I can fire it up and tunnel in without opening my whole home machine up to the work network and BOFHs. Isolation is cool.
We're in the process of setting up two VMWare ESX servers in our testing lab to migrate our 30 or so Windows and Linux testing servers. We generally need to keep 3 versions of our software available for testing and on Windows that's pretty much one version per machine. Multiply that by 4 versions of Windows. On Linux it's a little better, but we generally have to support at least 4 versions of Linux on Intel, more once we really go 64-bit. Out of those 30 or so machines, we're usually only actively using maybe 7 of them in a testing cycle, so one quad Xeon running VMWare ESX handles that load nicely. Especially since the lab is almost entirely made up of what I call sh*tboxes -- hand-me-downs from developers. The average box is a P3-500 with 256 or 512 megs of RAM.
#