Virtual Machines

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last year or so building virtual machines for Business Objects training, development and testing.

Up until now I’ve always used Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 to do so. However, working with a lot of different companies, I’ve seen the standard virtual server environment is primarily VMWare ESX.

As the new VMWare Workstation v6 has been recently released, I decided to give it a try a few days ago.

Already I’m in love with it. As I have a bit of a soft spot for Linux, and like playing with it every once and a while, I’ve spent countless hours trying to get Linux working under Virtual PC. Networking is also a bit of an issue under Virtual PC, though I’ve learnt all the tricks now.

Linux under VMWare Workstation is beautiful. One of the main issues with running it under Virtual PC is the graphics driver. When the X server loads in Linux, it’s distorted (unusable) until you fix xorg.conf. Really really fiddly. Under VMWare, it does it all perfect, no command line configuration required.

Virtual PC also has issues with graphics under Microsoft, so gaming is a no-go. Under VMWare though, I’ve installed XP Pro, got Starcraft running with no trouble at all, and am now about to conquer MS-DOS and all those old games that I loved. Descent 3… Wings of Fury… Maybe (if I can find it) Space Quest and Kings Quest and Police Quest… *sigh*

This week just gone I’ve successfully deployed Business Objects Enterprise XI-R2 SP2 into a three-tier virtual environment (Dev, UAT and Prod), with Active Directory SSO in IIS. Their servers are running VMWare ESX. Now it’s just a matter of confirming the virtual servers are powerful enough for a Production environment.

What have your experiences been with virtual machines?

- Josh

PS – Tomorrow I’m off to the V Festival to see The Smashing Pumpkins, Duran Duran, Queens of the Stone Age and some other bands. Should be awesome!! =)

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 6:33 PMand is filed under Business Intelligence, Virtualisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Virtual Machines”

  • Josh Fletcher Says:
    November 4th, 2008 at 4:24 AM

    hi john,

    yes, vista 32bit won’t see more than 3gb, that’s a 32bit limitation. that’s why i’ve had to go with 64bit vista.

    in terms of tips:
    1. build virtual hdds pre-allocated
    2. run as much RAM as you can
    3. don’t share RAM with other VMs
    4. watch out for antivirus scanning files, as they will scan files transferred between vm and host

    - josh

  • john gordon Says:
    November 3rd, 2008 at 6:26 AM

    Thanks.

    I’m using Vista 32bit, but can’t see more than 3gb, so I might go down the 64bit path.
    Any other VM image tips you’d like to share?

  • Josh Fletcher Says:
    November 1st, 2008 at 6:30 PM

    Hi John,

    My current host OS is Vista Business 64-bit, with 4GB of RAM.

    With a bit of experimenting, I’ve found that building your VMs with pre-allocated disk space is a necessity.

    My VMs run perfectly fine and are very responsive. I use them for demo’s, development and running training courses, so they are definitely responsive enough :)

    - Josh

  • John Gordon Says:
    October 31st, 2008 at 2:27 AM

    Josh

    What is your host O/S for running VM Workstation?

    I’m about to do a similar thing to you and can’t decide between having Vista or XP as the host o/s.

    I’ve heard Vista as host is slower, but is it really that much slower? The machine will be used for demos and development.

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