Virtualization
Virtualization is now a hot topic in the IT world especially to those system administrators, IT course trainer, and developer. It was first popular as a software, but the potential of virtualization have even capture the attention of hardware vendor, for example Intel processors that support virtualization.
For a person like me that using Windows at office but also like to toy around with Linux at home which is getting more attention. It will be costly if I were to have two machines one installing windows and one installing Linux.
In my early days of college, machine is expensive and resources are scarce. The only solution back then was to make my machine dual boot. If I am in windows and would like to go to Linux, I will need to restart my machine and change the operating system at boot time. Obviously, this is really time consuming and messy, not to mention the time and tediousness of installing those two under one umbrella and the problem occur if one of the operating system facing issues like corruption ( who else? still remember blue screen? )
Now, life has been made easy. All thanks to virtualization software such as VMWare, Microsoft Virtual PC, and VirtualBox. Virtualization software allows you to run another guest operating system on top of the host operating system without the need to reboot your system. Not limited, they can also be used so that you can have two windows operating system in one machine. Furthermore, as long as you have enough disk space, you can copy the whole snapshot of the operating system and move them to another machine that has the virtualization software install and used it straight away without going through all the installation and format hassle.
Personally I have used VMWare and VirtualBox but never try on Microsoft Virtual PC. Currently I am using VirtualBox because I find it easy to install and use, and most of the features are similiar to VMWare. In addition all the version is free to use for personal and education purposes. It is good for anyone that has long with Windows but would like to try Linux.
