Community IT Innovators. Established 1993. Serving social mission organizations with integrated technology services you can trust.

It’s time to admit I have a problem.   I keep telling myself I can quit any time I want.

I can’t look at a software product without thinking “I bet I should virtualize that”.

My habit started innocuously enough.  Microsoft sent me a sample of a product called Microsoft Virtual PC.  On my XP laptop I installed a virtual instance of Windows 98 and was suddenly able to play some of old favorite RPG’s that never developed support for NT architecture.  Maybe it was being lost in the imaginary world of Baldur’s Gate, but I began to see possibilities for using virtualization at the desktop level.

When I go into small organizations and have to take their domain controller offline, I have a ready made one on my laptop ready to join to the domain so the desktop computers can authenicate to the virtual instance all day while maintenance is performed.

Suddenly I was carrying test configurations of everything I needed to troubleshoot.  Windows systems with various versions of Outlook, Linux desktops for testing network compatibility and doing network scanning.   With virtualization, my laptop became simultaneously a sandbox for learning and a toolbox for administering networks.

One organization I support had a challenge of doing Arabic and Hebrew HTML newsletters.  Getting proper right-to-left formatting was difficult without international versions of Windows XP installed.  Those versions had problems with some of the other software we used, so I put Virtual PC at each desk and people could run the international version of XP for specialized tasks.

Virtualization is a buzzword now, but there was a time when virtualizing servers was new and scary.  Desktop virtualization is an easy way to become familiar with the basics of the technology before starting on virtualizing your servers.  There are two free products available that make this an easy start.  If you have installation disks for Windows XP, you can be up and runniing in minutes.

VirtualBox is the desktop favorite in our office.  It’s free, rugged, and works across Windows, Mac and Linux.  It’s lacking a little on the networking tricks side, but for a non-Windows user who needs that one Windows only program to run in a window, it’s a nice choice.

Microsoft Virtual PC  is also a free download.  I often use it to acclimate people to the idea of virtualization.  The interface is very Microsoft style, so long term Windows users are not intimidated by it.  Unfortunately, it is not cross-platform, so not handy for a non-Windows shop that needs some Windows licenses to run some software.

Come back next week and I’ll be using VirtualBox to walk through an installation and explain some of the vocabulary you run into.