Advantage in running a virtual machine

[satimis]

Hi folks,


Virtural box is new to me.
www.virtualbox.org

Its idea is not new to me. I'm also aware of Vmware but never testing it.

In my old days when I was running RH/Mandrake, etc. there were few applications running on Linux. Therefore I have to run "wine" installing Windows application on Linux box to keep me alive. Nowadays we have tons of application available on Open Source for Linux/Unix. Some of them you can't even find equivalent on Windows World.

I can't resolve what will be the purpose running several OS on the same PC (I don't run Windows). Even if I can build servers running on different OS on the same PC. What will be its advantage? The CPU resource has to be shared resulting in slowing down the speed of each server.

Please shed me somelight. Yours advice would be appreciated. TIA


B.R.
satimis

[AlienNation]

For the average user I think the most useful thing still is to be able to run certain applications that won't run in your host os. I for example used vmware to be able to run windows so that my poker software would run. I couldn't get it working with Wine or Crossover office and dual-booting is boring...

Another great use is for testing. Say you're developing an application. If you use virtualization you can try it on several different platforms without even rebooting once.

It can also be used for education. The most recent example for me was an internet security course where we used vmware instead of having several different physical machines to do our labs on.

Recently I started using virtualbox instead of vmware and I must say that so far it has been a much smoother experience. Setting it up was a breeze, vmware has sometimes given me some problem there (atleast in Linux)... Also, it's free of course, even though the full version isn't free as in speech.

Anyway, there are probably tons of more examples where virtualization is useful but this is what I've used it for personally.

[wheelnut]

I like virtual machines for the ability to work on a virtual network. It affords the option of working on items like firewalls without having to cripple existing machines, you can watch the packets go back and forth on the same screen, etc, you can even set up diskless booting between a host and guest (I know this for a fact, cos I have done it). It has the one big advantage that if you want to try something out, you can without altering / damaging your existing setup. The only downside with virtual machines is that you really need a big processor, fast hard disk and a load of memory for them to be very effective (1GB RAM, 2GHz+ processor and at least 4 GB disk space). Qemu is the software that I use and it is very good!

Hope that helps,

nut

[happybunny]

Testing, development, programing on other OS's, cost savings on hardware since most CPU's in a data center sit idle most of the time, ability to run other OS's for features or apps, ease deployment, D.R.

[ph34r]

Testing, development, learning (multi homed router setup with one computer anyone?), etc.

Also, in a production environment, if you have all VMs, it doesn't matter what hardware is hosting them... the "hardware" the virtual install knows about doesn't change...

[bwkaz]

If you ever need to analyze any kind of malware, doing the analysis inside a virtual machine (with no network access to the outside by default) is a really good idea. Then anything that the malware does is only done to the virtual machine, not your real machine.

(Of course malware can detect that it's running inside a VM sometimes, depending on which VM program you're using. Most of them leave telltale indications on some parts of their virtual machine environment (because of this, most programs aren't technically virtual machines, but they're still called that). Some of the more sophisticated malware can check for these indications, and stop itself from doing anything if it sees that it's in a VM. Makes it harder to analyze the malware.)

And of course this only applies to analysis of Windows malware, too.