Virtually a Reality — Virtualization in the IT World

R. Louis Costley III — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:00:16 +0000

Virtual Reality: Total Recall

Do any of you recall the sci-fi flick, "Total Recall," starring Arnold Schwarzenegger?

Back in 1990, I thought it was one of the most awesome movies of the day, and was enraptured by the concept that one could have memories implanted into their mind. As the movie progressed, you never knew if he was actually living the "vacation as a spy," or just having memories of it.

Today, my son partakes in online games where about half-a-dozen of his friends are playing the same game as a team, separated by dozens of miles and speaking to each other by headset, as they take on other teams from across the country. Amazing!

If you’re willing to part with 400 bucks, you can own a wrap-around set of eye glasses that will purportedly plunge you into the depths of games like Quake 4, Halo 3, Final Fantasy XI, multiple versions of Call of Duty … and the list goes on.

Testimony of some who’ve used it state that all you see from east to west is this gaming world. Amazing!

Virtual Computing

The beauty of all this technology, as it applies to us in the IT world, is that we can also partake in the Virtual experience. And, it doesn’t have to cost us much money at all.

Virtual Computing is the buzz, and it’s taking over so many facets of our industry. Virtual Storage, Virtual Desktops, Virtual Servers … it’s almost as if we’re coming full circle.

Remember when we had those "dumb terminals" hooked up to large, proprietary main-frame computers. Well, the enterprise community is moving in that direction, with virtual "desktop environments" becoming the trend.

Have you heard the term "Cloud Computing?" (Dave Lawlor talks about it in his article Backups Using Cloud Resources) That’s where all the applications are hosted on servers, and pushed out to the workstations, rather than installing the software directly on the PC’s.

Personally, I don’t like that, but it’s the direction vendors like Microsoft want to move in, where we’ll rent or lease the use of the applications.

Getting back on point, I’m actually writing this article to you from within Microsoft Word, on a Vista Ultimate "guest" system residing within the confines of my WinXP Pro "host" main system. As a matter of fact, I have a network comprised of 2 Windows 2003 servers and 4 workstations — all residing inside of my single home computer with 4 GB of memory.

It’s a closed, isolated, private network, and is what I use to get the "admin" experience I need to prepare me for my MCSA/MCSE certification. I’ll get into more details on this set up in a later article, as I discuss how to apply this technology to your own certification goals.

While the potential for all of this is astounding, and most of the articles online and in print deal with this from an Enterprise perspective, there exists a tremendous amount of opportunities for individuals and Small Businesses, alike.

Before we get into the potential benefits and applications, let’s delve into some basics about Virtual Computing. I’m not going to get into detailed descriptions of the variations that come into play, but a good place to start if you want to dig deeper would be here:

Virtual Machine — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_machine
Virtualization — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization

Virtual Memory

Any of you that run Windows would probably be familiar with the term "Virtual Memory." This is the process by which the operating system utilizes a designated portion of your system’s hard drive to store some the information that is held in it’s RAM.

This area is called the Swap File, or Paging File. By default, Windows will allocate a space equal to 1.5x’s the amount of your RAM. So, if you have 2 GB of RAM, your swap file would be 3 GB, thus your total available "Virtual Memory" is equal to 5 GB.

Should your system require more RAM than the 2 GB available, Windows will swap some of that RAM to your hard drive — or, rather, the information held in RAM — and make that RAM available for immediate use by whatever is requiring it. Often times, if your system appears to be bogged down, we’ll check to see how much "swapping" is taking place, and if it’s too high we may determine that you need more RAM on your system.

Let’s Host a Party

For our purposes, again, we will be focusing on the type of Virtual Computing that refers to a Host System and a Guest System.

As that logically implies, the Guest system resides on, or within, the Host system. It is Isolated, and for all intents and purposes, immunizes the Host system from any failures that might otherwise cause a computer to lock up, crash, or possibly burn.

For example, one can be running a Vista "PC" within the environment of an XP system. That Vista PC could become infested with a system-killing virus, and the XP computer that is "hosting" it will be completely clean.

Think of a submarine out in the ocean. Hundreds of human beings live inside that machine, with their own ventilation, electronic and plumbing systems built in. All that separates — or isolates — that system from the ocean that surrounds it is the skin of the submarine. The sealed walls keep the water out, and hold the electronic and human world within.

This is exactly how Virtual Computing works, in the context of Hosts and Guests. In this case, though, the walls that are erected to separate the two worlds are usually in the form of a software application, such as Microsoft’s Virtual PC or products developed by VMware.

I would like to draw a line of separation, here. For the most part, VMware products are developed and marketed with the corporate and enterprise community in mind. As this technology pertains to this series of articles, and our focus, I will be referring to the Microsoft applications Virtual PC and Virtual Server.

These are the applications I use, personally. Mainly, because they are both free to download and use. You can get these products here:

My purpose is to help you utilize this technology to achieve your certification and personal goals. I want to highly recommend the products that Train Signal sells on Microsoft Virtualization and VMware. I’ve used them, and they’re quite excellent. The instructor does an awesome job walking you through the specifics of each vendor’s offering.

Next week, we’ll cover the more practical benefits and applications to us as individuals. I’ll share my own experiences in setting up both Virtual PC and Virtual Server, and how I’ve used them in my own certification endeavors.

Until then, my best advice to parents of gaming teenagers — acknowledge from the start that they rule. Maybe, then, they’ll have mercy on you. Otherwise, don’t expect to get out of that "Virtual Reality" alive. EVER!

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 Released

Dave Lawlor — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 05:29:54 +0000

If you have already upgraded to Vista and tried to run Virtual PC 2004, you probably found that it was not quite the same experience that it was in Windows XP.

The newest release of Virtual PC 2007 solves many of the difficulties that were found running on Windows Vista. Virtual PC 2007 has been optimized for Windows Vista as both a host and guest system.

One of the biggest benefits of Virtual PC 2007 on Vista now is that if you have legacy applications that would not run on Vista, you can now have an install of XP as a guest system and then run those applications.

If you were holding off on Vista because of this reason you can now move forward. As always, the cost is the best … free! Download it here.

If you need further training on MS Virtualization, we can provide you with over 12 hours of quality video training at a great price.