Virtualization

I've been getting into hardware virtualization lately.  If you've never had a chance to play with it, it can take some serious head warping to really grok it.  The idea of virtual machines isn't completely foreign as anyone into video game system emulation knows.  Of course, as the word implies, video game emulation is about faking the chips so software thinks it's running on a different box.  With virtualization, the processor, video card, sound card, and other devices are real, but partitioned so different environments can use them at the same time.  It's pretty wild the first time you see the BIOS POST screen or the Windows startup logo inside a window on your desktop!  I've been pretty heavy into hardware virtualization for the past two years now with Microsoft Virtual PC, sometimes running as many as three “guest” machines on my physical box.  Each can see each other on the network, so you can really create some interesting scenarios with domain controllers, or other less common configurations that you wouldn't want to inject into a real home network.

Virtualization is cool since each virtual machine doesn't know about the other, even though each is running an entire machine configuration (Windows in my case, but other OS's are supported).  The big downside is you need a pretty good processor and lots of memory to run efficiently.  You can get away with 512MB RAM, but don't expect very great performance.  CPU isn't necessarily as big of a deal since machines sit underutilized so much of the time.  The other big limiter is that the Virtual PC runtime effectively cripples the video card to a lowest common denominator emulated configuration.  In other words, no gaming on a VPC (well, not smooth Direct X-enabled anyway).  This will change as time goes on, but it keeps virtualization pretty soundly in the realm of business applications for now.

Lately I've downloaded the VMWare trial, but it doesn't seem to like my machine.  I'm not sure if it doesn't like being installed on the same box as Virtual PC, but I don't see why that would matter (not running at the same time anyway!).  I already don't like a few of the features I have been able to see in VMWare, but maybe they'll grow on me (and maybe the problems will go away).  I'll post as I have more impressions.