The new age of virtualization

I discovered vmware six years ago, and I knew it could change the way we do technial support and QA entirely. You can easily create as many different machines as you wish, one with Win98, WinME, Win2k, WinXP, all in different releases, languages, patch levels... and for your testing you simply switch on the machine you need.

Even before the release of the GSX/ESX servers I took the workstation edition to set up a pool of different machines hosted on a huge Linux box. Each of them had a vncserver installed, so you could connect to the machine of your choice from your desktop.

I started with VMware workstation 2.0 and already this piece of software was a killer application. Since that time - we reached version 5.5 now - we got many new features and more hardware support.

The biggest change now is the licensing issue. You might have been able to talk your boss into buying you one license for vmware, but I bet it was almost impossible having him supply the entire team with that tool. Now VMware Player was released - and it's free! It is meant for running already configured virtual machines you created with the full product or you downloaded from a supplier like Novell, Redhat or Ubuntu.

It was just a matter of days until the world was told how to use the free tool to legally build and run your individual virtual machine. And indeed, how would you define "preconfigured machine"? Now even a new tool lets you create vm machines from the scratch, where you can configure RAM, disks, hardware support etc. - and upgrades your free player to a full product. Well - almost. The workstation edition offers a lot more stuff, especially the multiple possibilites to handle virtual disks. For example, you can tell vmware to discard all changes made to the virtual disk when powering off.

Why is VMware Player free? These guys must be nuts! Or quite smart :) At the SYSTEMS 2005 in Munich I had the chance to talk to one guy from VMware. They are totally aware what the community is doing with the free player, but on one hand they recently got some competition, and on the other side they hope that reasonable people appreciate the free tool and will be interested in supporting development by buying the full product for creation, and using the free tool company-wide for using the virtual machines.

VMware is pure fun, and it saves your life in tech support and QA.

technorati tags: vmware