Adventures in Virtualization and Sun's Virtual Box

Virtualization has been around for a while and of recent has gathered lot of interest due to "GO GREEN" initiatives and reduction in total cost of ownership. I had written in note in 2003 of a War of Third Kind about - on demand computing and later posted on this blog in 2007. (See- http://codingunknowingly.blogspot.com/2007/04/war-of-third-kind-reflection-4-years.html)

Now, it looks like my prediction on grid computing on top of virtualization is manifiesting itself as what we know as - CLOUD Computing. Sure, not in the most accurate description, but to achieve services through the cloud, an organization will need to maximize the processing power of its physical machines powering the cloud and then in comes the virtualization. There are already specialized tools and dedicated applicances to enable cloud powered services. But what is needed is a mindset shift for IT and software development community.

My own experience is virtualization started with VMWare Workstations and then went on to the ESX Server. More recently, I have been playing around with Windows 2008 and Hyper-V, as well a free open source option from Sun Microsystems called - Virtual Box. Check out - http://www.virtualbox.org/ for details.

Sun does have its more commerically tragetted offerings to build and manager virtual server infrastructures but virtual box is a good playing ground for enthuisants like me. Given a reasonably powerful desktop/laptop (really what I mean is non server class) machine, it provide a decent simulation for servers and virtual machines. So far, I installed Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Ubuntu Linux Server on Windows Vista host and had good success.

Couple of caveats on this free version of virtualization software, you cannot duplicate machines by simply copying the virtual hard drive image. (That would be strict no-no under Microsoft Licensing anyway.) and you need to plan for drive space on the virtual machine. You cannot increase the maximum size for the virtual hard drive. (It can be increased dynamically, in the sense, it only uses the space being used by the Guest OS. There are obvious downsides to that in terms of performance.)

My experience with Hyper-V has not been that pleasent. Though, it looks to be more polished and enterprise ready than Virtual Box. Using it on machine with a single NIC (network interface card) has been quite a challange. Inspite of reading multiple blogs and visit Microsoft support site, I have not been able to get the virtual machine and host to be on the Internet and local network on the same time. I am still researching the problem.