What do you think of Virtualization

[MasonComputers]

What do you think of Virtualization?
i am thinking of wiping my laptop bringing it back to factory, then installing VMware Workstaion onto the laptop, create a Vm within this and install windows & and use this then as my computer, so instead of installing software onto my laptop i will be installing everything on to the VM. therefore keeping my laptop clean.
if something goes wrong with the VM all i have to do is restore it to a snapshot.

Has anyone tried this?

 

[TLE]

I think this is overkill for this scenrio, you can achieve this with a good back up solution and maintain all the precessing power and memory rather than sharing it between a host and client.

 

[16k_zx81]

What do you think of Virtualization?

I think its unreal


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[MasonComputers]

i will be creating other VM's too, maybe win 2008 server or win 2003 server, for testing purposes, which will all be managed by my laptop, i can share the processor ram and harddrive between each, and add if necessary upgrade.
i think of it as a more centralized solution

 

[Rob]

I think its unreal


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I see what you did there

 

[TLE]

i will be creating other VM's too, maybe win 2008 server or win 2003 server, for testing purposes, which will all be managed by my laptop, i can share the processor ram and harddrive between each, and add if necessary upgrade.
i think of it as a more centralized solution

Ah, thats slightly different then if you are creating multiple virtuals. I use them all the time both for business, and for my full time work. Infact I have just finished installing Ubuntu on one so I can run SiPp for loadtesting our telephony servers.

 

[atlanticjim]

To the OP. I have a few laptops that I rent out while the customers computer is in my shop. When I first configured them, with OpenOffice and browsers some other Ninite software, I made a Macrium Reflect image disk. When they are returned, I pop in the disk and have a good clean lappy ready to go in about 30 min.

To the TN group: I have heard of using a VM for infecting and then testing virus cleaning techniques, for testing programs under other OS's but what are some other uses?

 

[MasonComputers]

the main idea i suppose is to use the laptop for more than 1 purpose, you can build a domain in vmware, very usefull for testing, applying patches and updates, deploying software via GPO to name a few.

i do a lot of windows server administration work, with this it gives me a portable way to bring my test network with me instead of waiting to get back to the office

i am working on a site at the moment which use vsphere 4, with 6 esx hosts, and it is very impressive they have over 140 VM's in this and still growing.

virtualization is definitely an area i would like to get into

 

[adam12]

I love virtualization I have an ESXi host that I use to run PC Repair Tracker, and a Wiki, and soon will be installing FOG. I have also used ESXi to save a business some downtime while we waited for new hardware. I was able to make an image of their server and convert it to a virtual machine with Acronis, this gave us time to get a new server.

The use you listed seems like overkill. If you only need to run one OS just run it directly on the hardware. If you are worried about hosing the OS, just create image based backups.