Virtual PC

[Frank Flanagan]

OK, so not formally a hardware topic... but, you'll understand why I put it here in a second.

Microsoft has made "Virtual PC" a free app.  VPC 2007 is now available.  What I am going to experiment with is this - how about the idea of installing the thinnest possible install of XP, then using VPC to run your "business" apps?  The result, in theory, would be a machine that was skinnied down, in this case, for game play.  Then, for running other items like Office and perhaps multimedia, you would fire up a virtual instance.  For development purposes, you could even run an instance of the separate database server and an instance of your client/development PC on the same box to simulate the production environment... all without giving up a single frame when you wanted to play a game.  For game play, you would simply kill those virtual environments.  =)

Just a thought.

[joe k.]

we just finished our virtualization project overhaul, in the end we put quad xeon's, 4gb ram, 15k rpm drives hot swappable raid 5, 250 x5.

we tried the free ms version, we settled on vm ware, we are doing 4 loaded database servers with external tape backups once a week for replication because bandwidth is such an issue.

Alot of amazing things that can be done, especially if you can fully transition one of your servers with that 64x, that extra number crunch comes in handy.

Most fun i have had in a long time learning.

[Frank Flanagan]

Joe,

Have you guys dabbled in VMWare's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure?  We (Jo-Ann Stores) recently rolled out our first VMWare server environment and will probably move just about everything to it within 18 months (we have to get off Novell first).  But, I'm also very interested in VDI.

[NeafOrderie]

I must say that I am no fan of VMWare, because although I have no clue as to how it did it, it screwed up my soundcard drivers on my non-virtual pc when I failed to get that same driver under VMWare working. Apparently VMWare is not completely independent from the host pc.
That said, another person I know using VMWare never got any problems whatsoever, and according to her it is ideal to run a different operating system when you dont want to fiddle around with dual boot which would be my optimal suggestion.

Dont know virtual pc, so cant say much about that.
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