kishorebhargava

Virtualisation has been around for a while now. As early as 1960 it just went by a different name, but even at the desktop level its been around since 1988. In recent years, its just become the big buzzword and with”cloud” computing being the fashion statement in technology circles everybody knows about it. I am not going to say much more about this, for between Wikipedia and Google there’s more than enough for you to read.

What I am going to talk about is how virtual machines are critical for a host of features. From simply trying out a different operating system to actually running multiple servers and services on a single physical computer to end-user support.

A few weeks ago, I got a panic call from a friend. She had bought a new phone and wanted to do the simple and logical thing, transfer her contacts from the old phone to the new one. Simple? Well it should be, however while trying to do this over the phone, I kept hitting stumbling block after stumbling block. Not only because I was not familiar with the OS running on her laptop, but more from the point that there seemed to be many critical components of software missing.

I suggested she come over with her laptop, old phone and new phone. We started by looking at what was installed and what was missing from her laptop. It was running Vista and no amount of trying made it work with my hidden WiFi so could not get it on the Net to install the missing components. I decided to fire up my Windows XP Virtual machine. Literally, a few minutes later I had the old phone all synced and backed up to my virtual machine. A few minutes more and I had all the contacts nicely synced to the new phone. Done in 20 minutes. I wasted more time trying to do this over the phone the previous evening and the time to trying to configure the WiFi.

At a recently concluded workshop for a client, I needed to demonstrate setting up a WordPress site. While I could have done this very easily directly on the net, I decided to give the participants a virtual machine on the wokshop CD so that they could actually try before they buy. I used the ready-made VM from TurnKey Linux fired up the VM on my machine and a few minutes later we were adding themes, plugins and had a good site running. the participants were amazed when they logged into the site from their own machines. All this over a small WiFi network that was running there. Totally rocked!

On a side note, the session I had was post-lunch and I had the mandate of keeping the participants awake. One of the organisers mentioned how everyone seemed alert and attributed it to my voice or rather the sound levels. Promptly, led me to introduce the session as “loud” computing

If you are not using virtualisation in any form, I’d suggest don’t shy away. Your computer is definitely capable of doing more and you’ll be happy with what you can do with virtual machines. Who knows it could save the day for you sometime.

Cheers…Kishore

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The post is brought to you by lekhonee-gnome v0.9 (from a Virtual Fedora)