I know jack shit about VMs, and am starting a project at work on them. Anyone got any links to some good sites to learn about VMs? Right now I'm playing with VirtualPC, since I've got Win7, but I'm not opposed to looking at other products. Eventually I'm gonna have to roll out a VM solution for my company, so that's my angle.

5/7/2010 9:13:14 PM

Can you be more specific about rolling out a VM solution? What problem are you looking to solve?

5/7/2010 9:17:47 PM

well, our main application for order entry and tracking is not compatible with Windows 7. It does work with Vista, but our plan is to skip Vista and go straight to Win7. We could upgrade the application, but the boss is pretty much dug-in about not doing that, as the last upgrade was quite painful.

really, I'm not 100% on going with a VM solution. I'm just trying shit out to see what the best option for the company is, whether it's Win7 with VirtualPC for everyone, or a VM server that people log in to from whatever kind of PC they have, or even just upgrading the fucking application.

so, basically, at this point I know that I don't know anything, and I'm trying to change that, lol.

[Edited on May 7, 2010 at 9:49 PM. Reason : ]

5/7/2010 9:48:10 PM

if it's just for one application, you're far better off doing it via terminal services. one server, upgrade the app once. install the client software and you're done.

the thing with doing it in a virtual machine is that you're gonna have two problems:

1. you're going to have to deal with licensing the second copy of the OS (if you don't buy the more expensive versions of Windows 7, admittedly a smaller problem).
2. you're going to have to deal with keeping that VM operating system patched and secured, same as you'd already have to do with the host OS.


if you're talking about something company-wide, VMs are going to be complicated and messy if you have to deploy to any more than a few machines.

[Edited on May 7, 2010 at 9:55 PM. Reason : moar]

5/7/2010 9:52:25 PM

that's what I am probably going to end up recommending, but I still wouldn't mind learnin about the stuff, just for kicks

5/7/2010 9:58:56 PM

sure, playing around is fun. but i'd argue learning to virtualize it with a terminal server would be more valuable, résumé-wise

5/7/2010 10:01:35 PM

if you're not up on virtualization and your job lies in IT, you will either not have a job very long, or not go very far. I would STRONGLY endorse your learning. vmware, kvm, and xen are the major players atm.

5/8/2010 10:38:51 AM

^ I hope by "up on virtualization" you just mean the basic concepts. Only a small percentage of IT people need to know how to select a VM product and setup a host and everything.

5/8/2010 11:23:36 AM

yes of course. I'm not a fan of vendor centric knowledge at all. cisco and ibm created the climate for that. the concepts of a hypervisor, h+1 hardware, hardware abstraction through software, and the pros of cons of such an approach are pretty core ideas to running any enterprise from now into the foreseeable future. in 5-10 years the whole concept of software being multiplatform will be a moot point as a hypervisor will be a staple of every OS and applications will only be locked to an architecture, not an "OS." hyper-v and kvm and just the beginnings. operating systems like qubes-os are the future. http://qubes-os.org/Home.html
/rant

5/8/2010 12:07:37 PM

that'll be cool as shit

[Edited on May 8, 2010 at 12:26 PM. Reason : qubes-os that is]

5/8/2010 12:23:52 PM

bttt. gonna ask what's probably a stupid question, but i've never had a need to investigate this before now... does anyone know if VirtualBox (or whatever else) supports 64-bit Windows guest OS installs in VMs? i'd be running VBox on a 64-bit host Windows OS.

5/13/2010 7:38:13 PM

*crickets*

5/13/2010 9:51:29 PM

I don't see why not. I've run WinXP 32bit and Win7 64bit in VMware on my Mac (64bit cpu).

5/14/2010 12:27:03 AM