BaerConsulting LLC Blog

Virtual Machines are great ways to test something before actually using a physical computer. Programs such as VMWare Workstation ($ – Windows and Linux), VirtualBox (Free – Windows, Mac, Linux), and Parallels ($ – Mac) have been used for years by administrators for running different operating systems under a pre-existing operating system. They function just like a normal program. You double-click on it and you can specify your desired hardware settings even down to the number of CPU cores that you’ll want (keep in mind that the hardware that you plug in should not exceed the hardware of the machine that you’re running the application on), and you can install an operating system within that application just as you would on a regular machine. We here and BaerConsulting love them because if we’re trying something new or untested, we can simply install and configure it within a virtual machine. If there’s a mistake, you can delete the virtual machine or the hard drive file just as you would any other file. Some companies even use these in a production environment. Say you were to have a dual quad core processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 2TB hard drive in a physical computer. You could run a Web Server under Mac OSX (if you can get Mac running in a virtual machine), a Monitoring Server under Windows 2003 Server, a Mail Server under CentOS, a NAS on the actual machine running whatever flavor of OS you prefer, and a PBX Server on Ubuntu, all running on that one physical machine. They would all run flawlessly because of the physical hardware specs you have on the physical machine. It’s a great way to learn Linux without having to clear your drive and dump Windows as well. Linux is free, so is VirtualBox, the only thing you’ll lose is some time and hard drive space.