A Virtual Revolution is Upon Us
February 20, 2006 | Leave a Comment
The virtual revolution is upon us, but unlike how we pictured it a few years ago
First, software companies such as Alcohol Soft made available consumer products like Alcohol 120%; giving users the ability to play the contents of a purchased CD or DVD from their hard drives. The software allowed consumers to create and then mount their CD or DVD images onto virtual CD/DVD drives. Hence, the product reduced the need to keep CDs and DVDs near your computer at all times. The entire process was painstakingly easy. You would insert a disc, create an image, mount your image, and then read from the image. You could then proceed to store your media away for safe keeping. Thereby, allowing you to protect your investment from the elements, children, and normal wear and tear. Other companies soon followed suit as they proceeded to give customers similar capabilities packaged into their products even as Alcohol Soft faced legal troubles. Now, the ability to easily create virtual machines has hit the mainstream.
At the forefront
VMware, a company who makes software that allows users to easily create virtual machines, recently announced that they would offer VMware Server beta for free download and made a similar announcement in December 2005 about their proprietary VMware player. With these recent events taking place chances are that virtual machines will soon become more commonplace.
VMware workstation 5.5, a commercial product offered by VMware, allows you to create snapshots of a particular state that you have a system in. You still have the ability to create backup images of you so desire. However, with snapshots it makes the process kind of redundant. Keep in mind that it is still good practice to create backup images of your physical system to easily recover from unforeseen disasters.
Other software is now available that allows you to migrate an existing physical system onto a virtual machine and vice versa. The products are a little pricey for the home user, but may not be a problem for large companies who want their tech personnel to gain valuable skills. In the long run it will help companies of all sizes reduce overall operating costs throughout their departments. A major selling point about virtual machines is that they will help reduce energy costs associated with having multiple physical systems up and running because of the need to have those performing different tasks. With a high performance computer system you can run multiple virtual machines to handle similar tasks, but you have the benefit of saving money both in hardware and energy expenses.
Other players on the market
Microsoft a few years ago purchased the rights to Virtual PC a tool formerly offered by a company named Connectix. It allowed Mac users to run the Windows operating system on their respective Apple products in emulation mode. As we all know, most commercially available software is primarily meant to be runned on Microsoft Windows. Thus, Virtual PC allowed Mac users to interact with their Windows colleagues in an environment where they could also run similar software applications, but on their beloved Macs.
Companies such as VMware have been around for a few years, but have never before created such buzz with home users as they are now. Today, VMware player and VMware Server beta are available for free download and VMware Workstation is available as a fully functional version for a period of 30 days. Open source projects, such as the XEN project, are currently underway that will eventually allow users to run a host operating system, Linux, and several guest operating systems such as Windows Vista or other Linux distributions with simplified ease. Moreover, there currently exist efforts by highly motivated tech savvy individuals to try to run Windows XP natively on new Apple hardware with Intel Duo Core chips built inside of them. These same individuals are seeking to port the Apple proprietary operating system MacOS X to an Intel based PC. Some of these efforts have been successful, but an alternative and simpler solution may be for users to run virtual machines on their systems.
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