virtualisation

There are 3 main offerings for free to enable you to use virtual machines on your box.

Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007, Sun's Virtualbox, and VMware's Virtual Server. I have up till now used Microsoft’s offering, which has got me through my 1st 3 MCSA exams nicely, allowing me to set up a virtual network of servers and XP boxes to go through all the practices on.

Just recently I am trying out the Virtualbox, due to a review I read in PC Pro. Virtual networking limitations and no usb support on Virtual PC 2007 are 2 reasons why I am interested in this.

Well, I have to say that I am well impressed thus far. Apart from being able to easily set up lots of subnets, and assign up to 4 network adapters to each Virtual box, there is USB support, the overall interface is nicer I think, and the amount of system resources seems to be a lot less.

I not have 3 Servers (Server 2003) on a subnet, and overall operation is noticeable faster than that of Virtual PC 2007.

Copying virtual machines on Virtual box took me a while and a bit of Googling to get the hang of, but I actually like it very much. There is a command line command set (vboxmanage) which has many helpful commands, one of which being ‘clonevdi’(.vdi being the file extension of a virtual machine for VirtualBox (Virtual DIsk no doubt). This allows you to clone hard drives for Virtualbox nicely.

Will post a more in depth review and tipset later...