Why Virtualization?

More for less has always been a motto of mine. If I can do more with less then great. I first experience with more for less was years ago I picked up an 8 port KVM, and everyone laughed at me. Why do you need 8 ports? Well ok at the time I only had 1 desktop and a laptop, but it was cheap. So I brought it home, hooked up the single monitor to both systems and realized.. less is more.

Years later I finally maxed out the kvm, using 2 laptops, a couple desktops, a Macinoths G4 and a couple Sun Workstations. But the idea of only having 1 keyboard and mouse and screen was nice.

No I have to wonder, why do I have 8 boxes infront of me, isn’t there a way to do this on 1 massive box? really I don’t need each of these systems on at the same time. Or if I do most of the time they are on they are idle.

Then it hit me.. Virtualization.

If I can run virtual pc, either on a mac or windows I can eliminate most of this hardware. Well, I never did. I just kept using all those boxes, dreaming of the day where I may be able to “alt tab” between Operating Systems, not just notepad and solitaire.

But then about 2 months ago I heard about just a program that could do that. VMWare Server. my interests where peaked again and I was looking into Virtualization to see where it was going. It could load up an operating system, run programs and suspend it all on a single server.

I didn’t have a few grand to build a quality server to test this out on, so Instead I rented. Motto number 2, why buy when you can rent. So for a month I rented a dedicated server box at Godaddy, and played to my hearts content with every piece of virtualization software I could find. Mostly VMWare Server and OpenVZ. Both of these programs had highlights and lowlights, and I will outline them later in other posts. But what this did was give me insight into where the enterprise computing industry is going.