Virtualize Me Part 2

So how else then has virtualization changed my life? Well for starters consider this:

On the front end right now I am writing this blog using

Firefox 3.5, which is running on

Ubuntu 9, which is itself running on

VMWare Workstation 6.5, which in turn running on

Microsoft Windows XP SP3, which is itself running on a

Dell D800 laptop with 2GB of RAM.

For those keeping score, the Dell D800 is a 2004 era laptop with Pentium M processor.

Also available on my system, running as a VM, is MS Windows 7 beta. (runs quite well actually).

On the back-end I am hosting my blog using

Drupal 6, which is running on

Turnkey Linux configured as a Virtual Appliance which is running on,

VMWare ESX 3.5 which is running on

A Dell 1650 Server. Again for those keeping score the 1650 is about 3 generations back. ***UPDATED*** ... now running Dell 1850 Dual Xeon and ESXi 4.1 from USB key

The back-end is a dev platform and is temporary until I move the site to a hosted facility, but you get the idea.

Squeezing more performance out of older hardware is a definite plus. But its the core concepts of how a network can and/or should be put together that have changed for me. For instance I can run both Windows and Linux servers at the same time on the ESX servers, instead of having the Dell chug along running 1 OS as it did for many years.

On the laptop, I was able to configure multiple OS's to run concurrently if need be if for no other reason than I felt like using Linux today instead of Windows. Or, better yet, you're working on a project in Windows and you just need to test a quick functionality under Linux, or OSX and just whip up VM real quick to check it out.

The bottom line is that I feel a flexibility in computing that I've never felt. A place where operating systems become more like applications or "appliances" that are movable, interchangeable, downloadable and suspendable any time you need them to be.

This flexibility has enabled me to reacquaint myself with the Mac OS, and get up to speed with Linux in a much more slip-streamed way. Sure there are road-bumps and things to overcome, but once you cross over to the virtual world, it gets harder and harder make sense of the old way of doing things.

But this also raises a question. Should everything be virtualized?

We'll look at that in Part 3