Virtualisation (take 2)

Well, hope everyone had a nice christmas and are looking forward to a great new year. I certainly am.

Anyway, just thought i'd blog about a development in my quest for the perfect virtualisation approach. People who know me know that I am passionate about the use of Virtual Machines (VMs) for practically everything I do. I just love the idea of having my main OS (currently Ubuntu 7.04), but being able to run Ubuntu / OpenSUSE / Damn Small Linux (DSL), or, indeed, any other OS that has the feature that I require (such as my 11g instance on Oracle Enterprise Linux, or my Ubuntu 10g XE database, again all running as RDP'able VMs).

In the past, I've always used VMWare Player, and got my head around the creation of VMDK and VMX files by the use of QEMU. However, recently, I've started to get my head around VirtualBox, an open-source project for managing your VM server, and, I must say, how impressed am I? The software is an absolute breeze to install / run, and the creation of the VMs through the use of wizards is a bit funny to start off with, but once you understand it, it's by far the easiest way to create all the fiddly configuration settings for a given VM, such as hard disk size, memory usage etc.

One problem with simply using VMWare player, as opposed to VMWare Workstation (or similar), is that you have to basically manage your VM server like you're managing file(s) and window(s), i.e. through a file manager. However, what I like about VirtualBox is that the software is
full enterprise-class software, having a VM manager, the full works! And, the fact that it's one of the only software which fully supports Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) (although, you can do this with other VM products, they don't fully support it... not yet anyway). For a little bit more information on this, see here.

Of course, it's OSS as well, and extremely light-weight.

So, as I'm writing this, Ubuntu 7.10 is being installed. I'll let you know how I get on with my future VM projects in future blog posts.

Have a happy new year!