Virtulization is very cool

Ok so in the clients office I decide that since i’ll be here for a few months I wan’t to use my own computer.. but i don’t want it to mess with ‘my’ stuff. So what do I do ? Set up a virtual box on my laptop of course.

Nothing new to the company (Yassonet) of couse as our entire PBX system is on a linux platform (TrixBox) as well as the very important media system that powers our PS3 (for movies and previewing music videos for youstation.com of course). The presoldtickets.com portal is run on a virtual box which we can add memory to by sliding a bar on the screen, and it also hosts our e-mail server. Now why is this important?  Because in virtulizing those boxes we save at least $500 monthly in rack space and a lot more control over the resources on our systems. Yeah.. i’m the type of nerd who’s a jack of all applications and only master of one .. hehe..

So on to the reason this epitome arose . My laptop crashed while I was working on some work ON the virtual XP machine (Laptop is Vista, VM is XP) . VMWARE (The virtual machine software we use here) decides to ‘suspend’ the XP box because it thinks something bad is going to happen. I’m pissed off because ‘both computers’ apparently are about to take themselves a lunch break.. so I do the same

45 Minutes later i’m back in the office with vista booted up, I launch the Virtual server and guess what? It starts back from the EXACT POINT that the system crashed. It apparently created itself a ‘snapshot’ of the state and goes back as if nothing ever happened. Actually, its what i’m using to write this entry right now.

Regular operating systems need to have this type of technology in place in my opinion, I couldn’t be happier and now i’m thinking about formatting this whole box (ok.. laptop) and keep the whole shebang virtual, running off ubunto or something i dunno. But virtulization is cool. I’m sure there are tonns more reasons out there that makes it cool as well but for now, i’m happy. I need more RAM i think .. but i’m happy