Virtualization has been a buzzword for me, until recently I stumbled across it and gave it a serious thought. I thought about sharing my experiences in this blog.

To start with we had some issues on our linux hosted webserver and had to do some sanity checks by duping it, on somewhat a similar kernel. The usual system resource crunch and the nagging system admins put me on a no mans land.

Left with no options, I decided to do some checks using ubuntu kernel. Remember I still have my notebook (windows XP) to try stuff on, I could have easily partitioned and installed ubuntu with windows and done my job. But probably I was more inclined to virtualization and thought of trying it out. I did some groundwork and came up with options like Sun Microsystems Virtual Box, VMware, virtual pc etc to name a few.

Suns Virtual box is a x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product and that helps me so I decided to move ahead with it.You can get more details from the virtual box website

Now I was ready for the download, the download was pretty straight forward and the product picked up all the notebook attached devices.Now I had to create a virtual hard disc on my parent OS and the steps were easy and well documented. But be sure to know the memory& HD size,space specifications for the OS you would need to install (I gave a 8 GB size for my ubuntu virtual partition).The virtual machine was created on click of the finish button, it was that simple.

I got a latest version of ubuntu and cut a CD for it, started the virtual box program ..selected the mounted CD disc drive and now it was like a clean machine which is ready to take any brutality . I kick started the ubuntu installation likewise I would do in any normal installation and went for some coffee, by the time I was back the installation was compelete and I was running an OS on a virtual machine !!!

The keyboard was a bit nasty initially to control the virtual OS, but setting some special key combinations solved the issue. I did my sanity checks which was the whole purpose of the karma and it turned out to be a good karma and was able to solve the problem.

Also later I came to know of the tool Disk2vhd by microsoft which is a utility for creating VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) which can be imported as an image/snapshot on our virtual box program. So in case you need to image your existing windows PC on another machine you can create a virtual hard disc out of it and import it. Making it possible to run the image as a virtual machine. Again the steps again are simple and its just clicks away.

Now am able to break the barriers of one OS/ machine and am able to test across platforms. Thanks to virtualization !! and hope this is of much help!