My Virtualization Related Presentations
I have recently been presenting on Virtualization. Here are links to those presentations:
- Overview of Linux Virtualization
- Xen Virtualization on Linux
- General Virtualization Introduction
- Introduction to Virtualization on Linux with Xen at
My Virtualization Story
As many of you know, I have been a long time Linux user. Having used Linux as my only desktop since 1995 I have had occasional need to use other operating systems. The need was mainly for collaboration purposes; trying to collaborate on Word documents between MS Office and Open Office only works with simple documents. Then again, the same can be said across MS Office versions.
Over the years there have been several options for using applications from other OSes. Hardware Emulators (like Qemu) and API Emulators (like Wine) had either been too slow or not emulated their targets well enough. Eventually people improved the emulators to work well with specific applications (like CrossOver Office), but they always had slight deficiencies that made using them too much trouble.
In the late ‘90s I discovered VMware and realized that Virtualization was the most reliable and convenient means to satisfy my cross platform needs. I was happy, and I helped evangelize VMware for this role to everyone who needed this problem solved. That was all well and fine, and life went on.
Then two things slowly happened. First, computers got much better, as they are want to do, so that they could run more virtual machines and run them better. Second, VMware made some dramatic improvements to their product that are unique to virtualization. They improved the general usability of their desktop products, added suspend/resume, snapshot capabilities, and then eventually multiple snapshots. These were tremendous advantages and incredibly useful features.
Now, the world of virtualization has exploded into a mad frenzy. There are perhaps tens of virtualization platforms available on a variety of consumer operating systems. People are dreaming up all manner of clever uses. Datacenter use is obvious, virtual appliances rock, VPS hosting and virtualization based cloud computing is cool. Everyone had best keep their head on a swivel, because as one JumpBox user said “The future is now, bring on the flying cars!”.
