Can an individual gain any real benefit from virtualization?

Question

I've read a lot of articles and heard a lot of buzz about virtualization recently. I agree that its pretty neat to fire up VirtualBox and run Windows on my Mac, however I know this is just the tip of the iceberg.

I read a lot about how companies are "spinning" virtual machines up a lot and all sorts of other interesting things. However, could virtualisation impact me, as an individual, beyond running Windows on my Mac when I want to play games or something like that?

Any suggestions for how an individual could benefit from virtualisation?

Answer 1

Most virtualization systems allow for some form of checkpointing. You could make a checkpoint before making a major change and use this as a form of backup.

It is also possible to run other versions of the same operating system for compatibility reasons. Say you have a program that runs only on Windows XP but you want to run Vista. Running Windows XP in VirtualBox is one solution to that problem.

Answer 2

1) Use a virtualized environment as a sand box for new software. Got a program you want to try out, but don't quite trust? Throw it in a virtual environment by itself. If it becomes destructive, simply reset.

2) Use a virtualized environment for development: Need to develop and test a complex set of installation packages? With a virtual environment its much easier to reset back to a base point when the installations go haywire.

Answer 3

One person in our office does all of his work on a virtual machine (VMWare). Then he backs up the machine image periodically to another disk. That way when his laptop fails (as it recently did), he can just restore the image onto another machine ruining VMWare.

Answer 4

Well for starters you save energy by not having to draw power for 2+ physical machines. You can run many virtual boxes on a single piece of hardware.

Second is portability. If you run a server from a VM and decide to change hosts, you can easily move it to a new location. Jeff talks about it in his blog post Virtual Machine Server Hosting.

Answer 5

Are you asking as an individual developer or as an individual in general?

I think that any infrastructure that forces you to work remotely - against a remote machine or against a virtual machine makes you developer in a more "deployment-oriented" mode. Programming on a local machine has the disadvantage of letting you be lax on things like builds, error handling, tracing, etc.

Answer 6

I have a virtual machines with several dev environments (VS 2005, VS2008, SQL Server 2005, 2008), testing environments with all manner of browsers and OSes installed (XP, Server 2008, Windows 7, etc). I love to keep my host OS as clean as possible and do installations, dev. and testing in VMs. It takes a beefy host, but once you start doing it that way, you never go back. :)

Answer 7

As developer, I have a VMWare Server based server at home.

Benefits:

• Optional number of Windows2k3/2k8 servers
• Sharepoint development
• Easy backup and restore if anything goes wrong

May you're interrested in features of VMWare. Some of them are related with "invidual" users/development not just medium/small business.

Other way for virtualization is Cloud Computing but maybe it's far from you idea.

Answer 8

For my school project my team is using an SVN server hosted on my personal linux home server. I use a virtualized instance of Windows XP to do continuous integration and testing of the SVN commits.

Without VirtualBox I would have needed additional hardware (read: couldn't have done this, I'm a student).

Answer 9

On the job, virtualization can be a huge productivity booster for individuals and small teams, but I think by "individual" you mean "off the job".

For myself, I've enjoyed the ability to run Linux machines under VMWare Player. I can use Apache, play with Joomla and other open sourceware, and otherwise do a lot of neat stuff without having to buy two or three new boxen for them.

Answer 10

I use the IE Compatibility virtual hard drives to test my web applications on all version of IE without having to install them.

HUGE time bonus.

Answer 11

I have several linuxes virtualized, never bothered to use dedicated computer or fiddle with installation. They're used for testing purposes only, just to make sure that our software runs well on either of them without surprises. In my case virtualized environment is good enough test bed and is incredible space/time/money saver.

Answer 12

It's also great for testing. You can use an image of an old windows 98 box with the browser it came with for testing your web pages, program installations, etc. It's much easier than keeping all kinds of old hardware around to test on.

Answer 13

From my post to this issue:

My company essentially virtualized in order to stop wasting so much time with upgrades/system failures.

Whenever a desktop/laptop failed, we'd have to spend a better part of a day fixing it and reloading the software.

So, we went out, bought iMacs for everyone and loaded Parallels (a VMware like product for OSX) on them. Then we made a standard dev image for everyone, and just copied it to everyone's machines.

Essentially, if anyone's configuration got messed, we just loaded in a fresh image and kept on truckin'. Saved a lot of time.

Some additional benefits:

When new software is out, we just make a new image and distribute it. Not OS re-installs or anything like that. If hardware changes, doesn't matter, just move the image. You can run multiple os's concurrently for testing You can take "snapshots" in your current image and revert if you really messed something up. Multiple builds on the same machine...since you can run multiple os's. Surprisingly the overhead of a virtualized system is quite low.

We only run the software on a real machine for performance tuning/testing purposes.

Answer 14

I created a virtual machine for my non-Internet savvy boss to use as a web browsing appliance. He can still use Internet Explorer (that's what he likes), but he does't have to worry about malware since whenever he closes the VM, I set up VMWare Player to revert back to a known good snapshot.