VMWare
by Stephen on Mar.06, 2007, under Tech Tips
Been using VMWare a bit at work to test out a few Linux configurations, that would normally involve me reinstalling a machine and being unavailable until I’m back in windows.
Being able to create virtual servers to test things is just so useful, I don’t know how I got by without it.
At home I’ve tested VMware with my dual boot system, 1 drive is set aside for linux, so I can now boot into Windows and from there launch my linux system, I’m sure most people will say I should go the other way and launch windows from linux, but linux is there for playing and windows is for games, I suspect that my games wouldn’t run so well in a virtual server but I’ve not tested that yet.
From work I’m playing around withvarious Raid configurations which would involve me having multiple drives available so I can change their set-ups, using a VM I can just delete the drives and start again if anything goes wrong. This way I don’t lose anything off my computer and can reconfigure and reinstall as many times as I need to.
To put it simply something like VMware (Microsoft have a virtualPC, there’s Xen too, I’m sure theres more I don’t know of) is essential if you want to play with/test another operating system or computer setup without having to repartition drives and mess about setting up dual boot systems. And whats best is it just works 🙂
