I’ve spent a considerable amount of time lately creating virtual machines on my work and home computers. In an effort to come up with a set of environments that make developing and testing applications easier I initially setup Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. In the few weeks that I’ve used it I have found that I need more than just Windows options in my virtual environments. This weekend I decided to give VMware Server a test drive … and just as quickly decided to uninstall MS Virtual PC. VMware Server is a free download, and according to the vmware website:

VMware Server installs on any existing server hardware and partitions a physical server into multiple virtual machines by abstracting processor, memory, storage and networking resources, giving you greater hardware utilization and flexibility. Streamline software development and testing and simplify server provisioning as you utilize the ability to “build once, deploy many times.”

At BlueAtlas I work with clients who need to be on Windows and I work with more clients whose applications run under Linux, or, in one case, Solaris. More often than not I find myself developing in Windows (Vista), and pushing to Linux. This has worked fine for me, however I don’t believe it is optimal. Enter VMware Server.

VMware Server

The really cool thing about VMware is that it allows me to take a snapshot of my Virtual Machine at any point in time. So, for example, I can take a snapshot, screw up my environment (which has never happened), and revert back to the snapshot. The other really sweet thing about vmware in general is that they offer Virtual Appliances. A virtual appliance is a “pre-built, pre-configured, ready-to-run enterprise applications packaged with an operating system inside a virtual machine“. Find the application you want to run, download the appliance, and hit the ground running. Right now I have Ubuntu running in a virtual machine, under a 30GB, 1024GB RAM environment. I also have WinXP Pro running in its own environment. In either case I can add/remove memory to the virtual machine depending on the work I will be doing. If I will be doing something that is memory intensive, I can just slide up the memory association prior to firing up the machine.

Not Everything is Going Smooth

I do need to say that not everything has gone smooth. I did get my wireless working in Ubuntu, only to have it fail after I restarted the virtual machine. In XP I can’t even connect to the Internet wired. How the hell do I get instant wired connection through Ubuntu and not XP?

I do have more work to do as I try to find the perfect setup, however I am committed to making this all work with VMware Server.