I am just starting to get my hands dirty with virtualisation, it’s a beauty. I remember using Microsoft’s Virtual PC product, the main thing I remember is the performance issue. Currently I am running Vmware 5.0 on a Duo Core 2.3 GHz 2GB RAM winxp OS machine and running three V-machines simultaneously is working super!

Once you setup a V-machine you prepare it for the OS of your choice and boot it from a CD, I thought they come with OS images but apparently they don’t -need to search on that-. After choosing the setting of your HD, memory, networks, etc. you can modify them once you powered off your V-machine and edit the setting by adding any component you want.

For convenience I like that I am able to drag anything from the host machine and drop it in the V-machine, kinda makes file sharing easier. Specify the memory utilization percentage.

So I have my company virtually running on my PC -who knows in the future it may become a reality ;D-

I got my DC, server, clients and now I am setting up the exchange. The thing is this is hard to setup and I am literally drooling to have my way with the new features I am about to configure so the debate between the reckless and sensible me begins, whether I should go LIVE 3ala 6ooool or behave myself and test first! It should be straight forward but then again what if it crashes. I think I should give testing environment a go. The more complex the system is, the more errors occur when setting it up virtually!!

The beauty of virtualization as a concept is that a physical host machine can run multiple virtual machines not aware of each other, that is each thinks it has it’s own dedicated hardware resources, so if you have a powerful machine and it is a waste to have one thing running but a risk to have another service running along side it … GO VIRTUAL … and it is fun for test -kidding myself- it is a MUST .. no more playing around with the real stuff before testing!!!

We’ll see how I wake up tomorrow, reckless or sensible ;P