The Neon Rush

An introduction to desktop virtualization

Jun 15, 2009 12:24

Today, I'd like to shed some light on how desktop virtualization has improved my life and taught me how to get the most out of the hardware I already own.

Virtualization isn't exactly a new concept, and for the longest time it was one of those words that I'd hear but didn't really pay attention to. (Cloud computing, anyone?)  

In a nutshell, virtualization allows you to install a completely new operating system (OS)--the guest OS--within the current architecture of your current hardware--the host OS. For example, you have a computer that came with Windows XP (the host), but you would like to run Windows 7 or Ubuntu (the guests) to add muscle to your computing experience. With virtualization you can add a totally new OS without affecting any settings of your current setup.

Here's a picture that may help illustrate the point better.  

My OS holy trinity: Mac OS X (Leopard) [host], Windows XP, Debian 5.0 (Lenny) 

So what do you need to make desktop virtualization a reality? For Windows users, Sun offers a free piece of software application, Virtualbox, which gets the job done.

For Mac users there are two popular applications, VMware Fusion and Parallels. Personally, I use VMware Fusion (used in the photo above) based on the excellent reputation that VMware has for server virtualization. I mean, if it can get several OSes to run on large corporate servers, running a couple of virtual machines on my desktop shouldn't too hard, right? From what I've read about Parallels on the interwebs, that program seems to work fine as well.

The good thing about virtualization is that you can run applications in the guest OS--also called a virtual machine (VM)--exactly as if they were running on the native operating system. Let's say you want to make the move to Windows 7 but desperately need to keep a program that's supported only on XP. No problem as you can clone your entire version of XP as a virtual machine and boot it up in Windows 7 as needed. 

The networking side of virtualization is easy as well. All VMs can connect to the Internet and networked drives as if they were their own standalone box. You can even drag-and-drop folders and files between operating systems, which is especially cool.  

The last example is one that may be of interest to Web developers. You need to test your layout in several browsers, but it's a real pain to boot multiple machines for a 5-minute session of CSS debugging. (And who wants to sacrifice the precious space?) With Windows, Mac and Linux installed on a single machine, I can test the following browsers from a single user interface: Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera, Google Chrome, Iceweasal, etc.  

The first time I did this it was interesting to note the subtle differences in fonts between the same browser, but on a different OS.  

The overall learning curve for virtualization isn't too bad. There are many useful tutorials and how-tos out there, so let the Web be your virtualization playground. (This is the one I used to clone my live version of XP and install it in VMware Fusion.)

If you have any other tips or anectdotes, please feel free to share. I'm curious to know what other benefits people have managed to squeeze from their virtualized desktop.

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