Virtualization - A new wave

It was three years back, it was an accident that I was hooked up with Virtualization without knowing that one day it would become a hot area. Today (at least from end of 2006), there has been so much advancements in Virtualization. It clearly remember that VMWare workstation was my first virtualization software and Linux was my first virtual machine.

During end of 2004, I wanted to learn Linux and experiment with it but did not have a desktop where I can install a farm of variety of Linux distributions. Once I thought, installing many distributions would make me Linux geek. Soon I realized that it wouldn't and got rid of so many distributions but I retained VMWare workstation simply because it was (is) a cool tool. My first assignment with Linux was to learn POSIX threads and compare the threading behavior with Solaris. As I was doing the first assignment, since I am a monkey, I wanted to jump to writing system calls. Taking a snapshot in my virtual machine (which will save the current state), I moved to a fresh state and started the experimentation of Linux system call. (Actually I completed both the work and published two articles in Linux for You - Confession to say that I m trying not be a monkey).

Two years later, I got a chance to install the new version of VMware workstation and to my surprise it had hell a lot of features like running multiple VMs, networking them, wide range of virtual hardware configuration, record and play back. After exploring the entire VMWare workstation, I realized that it is killer tool which could actually be used for maximizing resource utilization and also to improve productivity. If you are impressed and want to read more, I would recommend you to read some white papers on Virtualizaton from VMWare

These days, many of the organizations are trying to use virtual machine to reduce the cost of hardware and more importantly I feel Virtualization has key role to play in making this world green. Since you virtualize so may PCs, you end to using lesser power and your system dissipate less heat which is good for our planet. If you are a software developer or a decision maker and an environmentalist, you got to seriously consider in using virtualization.

Apart from commercial virtualization software, you can also find few open source or free virtualization software. Shortly, I will be writing on more blog on virtualization products. both commercial and open source.