ITCOW [L]

Spell it with a “s” or a “z”, it doesn’t matter. It’s somewhat the way of the future, it’s not new and it sure does save money and space.

What difference and impact does it actually will make for the average home users? What about small to medium enterprises? servers?

This very page you are reading runs off a normal PC, an AMD AM2 processsor at 1.8Ghz (3000+ in AMD speak)with the ram, harddisk all that and on a virtualised Fedora Core 7. See the specs.

I run off another 2 more copies of Redhat Linux 9 and Fedora Core 6 off the same machine for testing. Making all 3 of them boot up and running at the same time is sluggish but nothing adding a few more strips of ram can’t fix.

It’s a good tool. For testing of applications, how the web server will behave before you actually implement the changes. Testing how your web pages or blog will behave before committing the final changes on the production servers. I ran Vista for 2 weeks and jumped back to Windows XP SP2 immediately early this year, the drivers support were really bad and software I need up and running never seemed to work. It’s improved quite a bit, I virtualise a copy of Vista on another machine to test out software I’ll be in need of. It has improved but not time for the full switch as of yet.

Want to try out Linux all along and heard all the talk about how it can revive your old PC hardware that are slow and old? Don’t waste your time. Linux itself even, has moved past a lot of that and you can experience and learn faster with it’s GUI, though needs little effort to run, will not be pleasant if your PC is not up to it.

One of the most popular distribution out there now, Ubuntu, try it out on a virtualised environment. You don’t even have to install it. Try out the “live-cd” edition. No installation required, run the virtualisation software of your choice (VMWare is a good start – start the “server” edition. It’s free, register for 10 or whatever the number of machines you’ll need keys for.)

Big boys are getting into the game. Microsoft. It’ll get a lot more interesting to what they can offer.

So, companies interested. What can virtualisation offer you? Check out their higher end product and explanation of their Infrastructure 3 here. Sit back and just view on (direct linked) Youtube.

Uptime is more and more of concern even to small business from selling of products through their webpages to offering of online customer support. Uptime is everything. Virtualisation can help a lot in that.

Hardware failure? Not a problem, move the virtualised operating system running your OS with all the bell and whistles properly configured over to another server, boot it up and it’s ready to go.

System crashes! Retrieved the backup copy of the virtualised OS, boot it up. Back in business then spend time troubleshooting what went wrong on the old copy. Some coding you did?

Consolidate the few racks of machines you have into just a few more powerful servers running the same apps/ OS/ others. Space are expensive in this part of the world…

A good plan is all you need to prevent all these from happening and the downtime will forever be the time that is needed to boot up the machine. Not recalling tape from an offsite vendor + frustration of getting put on hold + travelling time of the vendor to your office + going to the wrong building to meet you + restoring the tape + kicking all the changes back and actually rolling back the changes.

You don’t need a really powerful PC, you just need a lot of ram as you can see. Give it a try, your home PC bought anytime within these 2 or 3 years would be able to do it.