If you know me you know that I have been on a huge kick to get people to use all of the cool vitual server/pc stuff that is out there. Well VMWare decided a while back that it was going to make some (all?) of its products available for free. I know that there is a Player product and a Server product available right now. Also, Microsoft has slashed its prices for VirtualPC and Virtual Server. With prices falling for these software packages things should be heating up.
The one thing that people keep asking me is "Why should I use this? Hardware is so cheap, I would rather just have extra boxes that are full power than a bunch a Virtual Machines (VM) sucking air." Well this is true, but here are somethings that are cool uses for the technology now.
Making software easy to install. Imagine not having to learn how to configure and install Linux just to try it out. Download this VM and presto welcome to Linux. How about trying out a new programming language. Don't want to have to figure out how to install Ruby to get a chance to check out Ruby on Rails? Download this VM and you are all setup with everything you need to demo Ruby on Rails, or Lisp, or Smalltalk, or whatever.
How about security? According to this press release Mozilla is going to make a VM that is set up as a VM Browser which will let you surf the internet in complete security. Something breaks? Shut down the VM and all rollsback to a clean state.
Are you a developer? How cool would it be to develop inside of a VM? You could install all of your apps once, and then just move the VM around to whatever machine you want and your good to go. No setting up Apache or IIS just for this box. No, "Shit! I just killed my machine!" just roll the box back. (Of course you still need to make sure to commit your code before such actions. ;-)) Also, no more multi-licensed software so you can use it here and at work.
I can't help but think about how this concept is going to change things. One thing that strikes me is that all of these VM's are going to be using Open Source Operating Systems. After all who wants to pay a license fee for each demo VM they ship. Which raises the question that most intrigues me. How will Microsoft and Apple respond to this? If at all.
<update> I could develop my server application on my machine, and then deploy it on my machine to a Virtual Server. I would know for sure how my app would work when I threw it over the wall into production. Very cool. I wonder if I can hot backup a VMWare virtual server? Do these virtual servers that are running on the same machine talk to each other over more efficient means that tcp/ip? I heard that MSFT Virtual Server lets them talk directly to each other by faking the tcp/ip stuff or something. </update>
It will probably be a while before this is a real issue. But watch out. Virtual land here I come!
Dru
We expect to ship the first CTP of SQL Server Everywhere Edition this summer, with the goal of final release before the end of this calendar year.I just want to know: What is the footprint? Press Release
