Virtualization

Virtualization is shaping up to be a big deal in the IT industry.

It makes sense. Many of the server boxes manufactured today far and away exceed the requirements necessary for the typical server's one-maybe-two roles. From a beancounter's prospective, this is extremely wasteful -- why buy five brand new boxes that each only use 20% of their potential? Wouldn't it make more sense to buy one box and max it out?

That's exactly what virtualization allows us to do. Gone are the days where having a 10 box server farm is required. If we wanted to, we could throw all of those old boxes onto a single new box and be praised for saving the company money.

Server 2008 will include (via add-on) a product currently known as Viridian which is a method of accelerating hardware virtualization and makes running virtual servers a little easier. It won't be ready in time for the Server 2008 release (whenever that is), but we're assured by M$ that it will be available sometime soon after.

Virtualization is relevant to you guys, as students, too. As you probably are aware, we use virtualization to make your lives easier in class (ok, let's be honest: it makes my life waaaay easier). If you haven't already, I urge you to download Virtual PC 2007 (Microsoft's virtualization software that's not designed to run a server farm in production!) and use it to practice the concepts we go over in class. It will, in effect, give you a second home computer (running on the first) and keeps the rest of your family happy by providing them a way not to have their home PC reformatted every couple of weeks by the resident geek (that would be you).

So, back to the issue of how Virtual PC makes my life easier: I spent part of the afternoon preparing your hard drives for the upcoming summer quarter. Out of my six classes, I have four in "the dork lab" which require computer use. Using an external DVD drive, I was able to flash everyone in those four classes with their PCs that they'll use for the quarter. What we used to have to do is have an "install" day where we just installed OSs for the entire class -- burning a week of class in the process. Now we can hit the ground running! Total time to get four classes worth of hard drives ready: two hours. Nice.