The promise (and cool-ness) of Virtualisation...

Well, I've been having some fun recently with VMs. Basically, I've got my head around QEMU, along with VMWare Player, and have been having fun with setting up a whole series of VMs to suit my purposes (both short and long term). At the moment, I'm blogging this in Ubuntu (my "main" OS), I've got my own personal wiki running using a MediaWiki via JumpBox VM and evaluating Damn Small Linux ( a 50MB (yeah, 50MB!) Debian / GNU LInux distro ) as an OS which could eventually make it's way onto my kids PC (when they get old enough to want one, of course, and by that time something else will probably have made it's way on to the top of my "this is extremely cool" list.... ;-)).
Oh, did I say that I was also using the same wiki from Windows XP and Windows Vista laptops as well, and I've got a seperate Ubuntu VM for my Oracle 10g XE installation? All this and most of the VMs have either VNC or RDesktop which allows me to remotely access them.



My long term goal is to have some kind of low-energy server (wouldn't even need a monitor) with a very lightweight OS, i.e. just enough to run the various VMs, such as Oracle, proxy server, web server etc., and then have the other machines simply connect to them via TCP/IP (with VNC access, if required). Most companies I know of which utilise VMs do so in this way. True enough, the VM server has to be relatively meaty, but they can be very "hardware light", i.e. no hard disk is required with the advent of NAS drives. Creation of VMs can always be done via ISO disk image, so I suppose that at least one device has to have a CD/DVD drive, but it doesn't have to be the server. Certainly, no monitor is required, since VNC access from a "client" device can see the output of any VM, and booting can be done from USB pen drive.



My current thoughts for a lightweight "computer" for the kids is, therefore, a laptop with no HDD or CD/DVD drive, with motherboard ability to boot from USB and a USB drive with Damn Small Linux (DSL) installed on it. All file system storage can be done on a NAS drive,
and any particular programs that they need, I'd simply set up a VM, but let's face it, there's a heck of a lot of on-line office applications now (i.e. word processor / spreadsheet etc) that simply run in an Ajax-enabled browser.

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