I've decdided this week is a good week to start blogging my work, I have to choose my optional modules for college next week and I think I might even find myself blogging some of that. Purely because I have no doubt it will help me out in the future, and it might even help someone else out, so big smiles all round!
I've decided I'm going to start with something simple, and quite possibly my favourite part of what I do.
This will lead in to a quick tutorial on how to set up a virtual machine, but for now I'm going to stick with a basic overview of what I know, and if any of you guys can think of anything to add, maybe something you find helps you with VMs then that would be seriously cool!
Ok, so lets start with what a virtual machine is. Simply put, its a software representation of a physical PC. It takes on the characteristics of the host machine that it is stored on, for example it shares RAM, disk space and CPU cores with the host, as well as optical drives and peripheral devices.
The handy thing about having a virtual machine installed on a personal computer is that it allows you a second operating system, and although physically its on the same machine, it will act seperate from the host. Kind of like using remote desktop to access another computer. This is handy for testing purposes, or if, like me, you like to switch things round a bit. I have a laptop running windows 8.1, which I actually really like, but every now and again I'll need it to do something and it just laughs at me (not literally, obviously). For this reason I have a virtual machine running Ubuntu Deskop.
I like Ubuntu.its open source so it's free. it looks good and its easy to use. The only problem with it is trying to install Flash Player. That is an absolute ball ache.
I find it useful having two OS's runninng at once on my laptop. Dual boot mode means I can only run one of the OS's at a time and if I want to run the other one I have to reboot my computer, with a virtual machine I just open up VMPlayer (which you can download for free from the VMWare website), and off I go.
I use virtual machines at work because I have a habit of getting frustrated. deleting the machine and starting again. and believe me that's a lot easier than reinstalling the OS of a physical computer. I've spent the last month trying to set up a working LDAP/Samba server and only got it working at the end of last week. I deleted and reinstalled a lot of machines in that time, but truth be told I enjoy the process.
There are so many options when it comes to virtualisation. You could easily (probably in the workplace rather than at home) dump all of the big hulking towers on everyone's desks, and replace them with thin or zero clients, then pick up a couple of relatively cheaps servers with lots of cores and disk space, and set everyone up with a virtual machine. When people log into their computers in the morning they'd actually be logging into a server so they could have tiny form factor computers on their desks. updates would be easily deployed from one place, everything would be stored on the server rather than on the machine, so clients would only need small hard drives. You'd obviously need a secondary server for back up, and it would take a lot of planning, but the opportunity is there!
A little bit later on I'm going to start uploading my guide to creating a Samba/LDAP server starting with setting up a virtual machine. Watch this space!
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