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iTunes (Score:3, Interesting)
I had a Win7 VirtualBox running on my Linux laptop for nothing but iTunes when I had an iPhone, and now I basically still just have it lying around for no legitimate reason. Using it is horrible, since it boots up every several months for something quick and then wants to run all the new updates...
Re:iTunes (Score:2)
Familiar problem - for me WinXP that I had to use for e-banking. The one computer that I used mainly was OK (though occasionally slow due to updates) the other computer was a disaster. Could take half an hour for it to become usable thanks to all those updates.
Luckily not needed any more; bank now works without special Windows-only software.
Only VM that I'm currently using is a cloud server for my e-mail and web hosting needs. And that's a Debian system.
Re:iTunes (Score:2)
That must be a very retarded bank - i've banked with a few different institutions over the decade or so i've been using net banking and they've all worked with at least one of the web browsers available for Linux.
Re:iTunes (Score:2)
The problem was that they used a USB device for authentication, and the drivers for that device were Windows-only. For the rest it worked fine in Firefox, which I always used for browsing. Now this has changed, using an external calculator-type device for that, and I can use Linux.
Re:iTunes (Score:2)
Re:iTunes (Score:2)
Re:iTunes (Score:2)
News at 11 : Software get's updates while not being used. Sure, only, ONLY (!!!!!) itunes has the audacity to be updated without your written permission
Uh, what are you talking about? iTunes notifies you of the new version and specifically asks you if you want to download the new version. This applies to new full version-number increments and .0.1 maintenence releases as well. You just tell it "no" and can even set it to not notify you again about that specific new version (but still allowing it to tell you about the next version that comes out, if you wish..
Re:iTunes (Score:2)
Re:iTunes (Score:4, Funny)
News at 11 : Software get's updates while not being used. Sure, only, ONLY (!!!!!) itunes has the audacity to be updated without your written permission.
Your comment must be the most idiotic one I have read today.
Bonus points for a complete useless and wrongly used ellipsis.
This reply post was upgraded since last posted.
This reply post has been deprecated since last update.
Re:iTunes (Score:2)
Bonus points for both a completely useless and wrongly used apostrophe and a completely useless set of exclamation marks.
Re:iTunes (Score:2)
since it boots up every several months for something quick and then wants to run all the new updates...
Key work is wants... so it could be MS or anything really asking to update...
that I can see the annoyance.
Re:iTunes (Score:2, Informative)
Re:iTunes (Score:2)
I hope that was supposed to be sarcasm.
Missing Option (Score:5, Interesting)
Where's the "I am sick of these thinly veiled Dice bullshit marketing polls" option? I'm done voting in these things.
Remember when Slashdot polls used to be for fun and covered silly/interesting things? RIP, Cowboyneal.
Re:Missing Option (Score:5, Informative)
Poll ideas are always welcome!
Just use the same submission page (linked at the top of the page) and throw us some wacky ones.
No thin veiling; this question sprung fully formed from my forehead, like Minerva from Zeus. Dice has a marketing department, but we human editors come up with the poll ideas; some of them suck, I grant, but no conspiracy is necessary for that.
Looking at slashdot.org/topics.pl is a good place for inspiration if you want to come up with some poll suggestions ...
Cheers,
timothy
Re:Missing Option (Score:5, Interesting)
Minerva didn't come from Zeus (Score:3, Informative)
She came from Jupiter.
Re:Minerva didn't come from Zeus (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Minerva didn't come from Zeus (Score:2)
You cease being a riot at parties starting 35. 40 if you're lucky. Brain is all that remains afterwards. :)
So rather than 20 years of partyman, better 60 years of smartyman
Re:Minerva didn't come from Zeus (Score:3)
She came from Jupiter.
Not if Zeus pleased her more. Those old gods really were quite incestuous.
Re:Minerva didn't come from Zeus (Score:2)
Last I checked, Jupiter was the same god as Zeus, the Greek pantheon being the basis for the Roman.
(And Minerva was the same goddess as Athena.)
Re:Minerva didn't come from Zeus (Score:2)
I can confirm that this is still the case.
Re:Minerva didn't come from Zeus (Score:2)
What about now?
And now?
still?
Re:Missing Option (Score:5, Informative)
this question sprung fully formed from my forehead, like Minerva from Zeus.
ObPedantry: you've conflated Greek [wikipedia.org] and Roman [wikipedia.org] mythos. In English vocabular, it's accepted. [etymonline.com] In mythology, not so much. Well, as much as mythology matters to anyone.
And, more on-topic, you can certainly understand the perception in Slashdotterland that much of the content nowadays feels like marketing probes from Dice or other corporate overlords.
Re:Missing Option (Score:2)
Of course he's conflated Greek and Roman. Romans were dedicated to the shameless copying of the Greeks.
So conflating the two pantheons should not raise objections from anyone that's not a current member of the cult of Zeus.
Even then, I suspect that such a person in the flesh would not object either.
Re:Missing Option (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity! ;-) (I didn't really think it was stupid, just not all that interesting.)
Re:Missing Option (Score:2)
I actually thought this poll was a nice respite from the 'thinly veiled Dice bullshit marketing polls' that seem all the rage lately.
There were no "less than or equal to" options, the choices seem playful geek humor to me.
Re:Missing Option (Score:2)
You want a flame-war poll?
[ ] Furry is cute/sexy
[ ] Furry is sick/for perverts
There you go.
Re:Missing Option (Score:4, Funny)
You want a flame-war poll?
[ ] Furry is cute/sexy
[ ] Furry is sick/for perverts
There you go.
Ah! I see. So the flame war is about radio buttons vs checkboxes for the poll options.
Re:Missing Option (Score:2)
It's to make the flame war more interesting by having people complain about percentages not adding up!
Re:Missing Option (Score:2)
...some of them suck, I grant, but no conspiracy is necessary for that.
You must be new here.
Re:Missing Option (Score:2)
this question sprung fully formed from my forehead, like Minerva from Zeus.
Missing option: WTF is WRT [wikipedia.org]? (no, seriously... I'm lost in semantics)
Re:Missing Option (Score:2)
Re:Missing Option (Score:2)
Cowboy Neal is my virtualizer. Also, I see nothing wrong with this poll option. We can discuss about how much better VMs are for safety (except that I took the blue pill). We can discuss how much specialized software sucks (and/or how much it sucks that Wine isn't quite good enough yet). We can discuss various things.
Anyway, I have a VM with MS Windows 2003 on it, that I only use very occasionally for software that won't run on Linux or with Wine.
I also have a DOS VM for games, but I've mostly been playing FreeCiv recently.
Re:Missing Option (Score:2)
Re:Missing Option (Score:3)
I must have missed the poll options of "I use Dice (TM) VMs every day and they satisfy all my business needs!", "My virtualisation was so difficult until I purchased Dice (R) Super System VMs!" and "Without Dice (R) VM Buddy Management Solutions Networks, I don't know where I'd be; their effortless implementation of virtualisation has saved my business-critical cloud solutions and turn-key management time and time again!"
Maybe I wasn't paying attention.
I never surf the internet from the base OS anymore (Score:5, Informative)
I use a Linux VM for all surfing in VirtualBox. Surfing directly from your base OS seems incredibly risky to me, particularly if the base OS is Windows. Kind of wish the VMWare server kernel could be modded to run guest OSs directly on the same platform. I'd put it on my portable in a heartbeat, however, running VirtualBox hosted VMs on Linux is just as good for most purposes.
Re:I never surf the internet from the base OS anym (Score:3)
Closest to this would be going with Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V, as that is a level 1 hypervisor (same level as ESXi.) The advantage is that other VMs run at the same speed as the base W2012 instance, and you can use that as a VM console.
Of course the disadvantage of having a full-fledged OS as a console or a place to remote into the VMs is having to keep it secured and patched, even if it does little other than provide a keyboard and mouse to the consoles of the client VMs.
Probably the best scenario would be having a dedicated ESXi box, and the main access to it is via a heavily secured client. At least then, it is hard for a VM to infect the client that is remotely connected in unless drives are shared.
Re:I never surf the internet from the base OS anym (Score:2)
Hyper-V, as that is a level 1 hypervisor
But if it kills another orc, it will become a level 2 hypervisor!
Or do you mean a type 1 hypervisor [acm.org]
The advantage is that other VMs run at the same speed as the base W2012 instance
This is not an advantage of Type 1 hypervisors. The advantage is (in theory) a smaller TCB.
Re:I never surf the internet from the base OS anym (Score:2)
Windows 2012 Server boots first, then after a bootstrap the Windows 2012 O/S migrates out of Ring-0; so it eventually ends up as a Type-1 but it doesn't boot as a Type-1. (The same is true of Xen, for example; it boots as pure Linux and then Xen takes over Ring-0)
ESXi is literally a bare metal and boots directly into the hypervisor.
Workstation and Fusion, once spawned, are hosted applications, but still have direct hardware access to hardware if you're on a box with hardware-assisted virtualization instructions (ie, intel vt-x).
So the idea of Type-1/Type-2 is sort of dated anyhow as a division.
Re:I never surf the internet from the base OS anym (Score:2)
It's a distinction without a difference. ESXi is just a very limited OS aside from its hypervisor duties, but it's enough of an OS to run other applications on, such as virus scanners.
Re:I never surf the internet from the base OS anym (Score:2)
The same is true of Xen, for example; it boots as pure Linux and then Xen takes over Ring-0
No it doesn't. Xen boots and then launches a PV guest as dom 0. The PV guest starts in ring 1 in x86 or ring 3 on x86-64 with the CPU already in protected mode. The kernel entry point is also different for PV guests, so that you can have a single kernel binary that boots as a PV guest or a bare-metal OS. With newer Xen, the dom 0 guest can be PVH, so it runs in ring 0, but with Xen in the hypervisor 'ring -1' mode. It still starts via the Xen entry point, however, not the normal boot process.
Re:I never surf the internet from the base OS anym (Score:2)
All right that's it, kind of off topic but I'm creating a separate user for firefox. Have thought about it for months, the applications are really not well enough sandboxed, even in linux. See you later, when my firefox will be logged in as "browsing".
Re:I never surf the internet from the base OS anym (Score:2)
Done & done , Using KDE's "run as" (that was quick :) I already don't give "others" read access to my /home, and I never log in as "browsing", just start firefox, so I think i should be safe-ish.
Re:I never surf the internet from the base OS anym (Score:2)
useradd (or a GUI that does the same thing), sudo that_new_name, firefox - then if you want ten more seconds to setup an icon for the command "sudo that_new_name -c firefox".
From then on that otherfox is a click away.
Re:I never surf the internet from the base OS anym (Score:2)
I use a Linux VM for all surfing in VirtualBox. Surfing directly from your base OS seems incredibly risky to me, particularly if the base OS is Windows
Don't run Windows as your base OS. Problem solved. ;)
By the way, I would think that running Windows as the host and using a guest OS in a virtual machine exclusively would make software installation unnecessarily difficult... or at the most, very weird and awkward. Unless your intention in Windows is to play games or do something else you need fast 3D acceleration, it seems to me that running Windows as the guest would make the most sense. Keep Windows self-contained in a little sandbox in its own virtual machine, where it can do no harm to the core/host system.
Re:I never surf the internet from the base OS anym (Score:2)
Re:I never surf the internet from the base OS anym (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, pretty much everything anyone wants to digitally steal from you is on your browser.
Source:
http://xkcd.com/934/ [xkcd.com]
http://xkcd.com/1200/ [xkcd.com]
You might be interested in Xen (Score:2)
Anyway, if your system supports VT-d for Intel or IOMMU for AMD, you can create virtual machines and pass video cards and USB controllers to each of them. Use Synergy or a KVM to switch between VMs, or, since PCI-E supports hotplugging, you can literally ping-pong the video card and other peripherals between them to change your outputs. It's really slick stuff.
Here's a video [youtube.com] if you're curious about performance.
Re:I never surf the internet from the base OS anym (Score:4, Funny)
No problem, he's using a virtual keyboard too. He gets a new, clean keyboard every time he reverts to the clean build.
corporate policy (Score:3)
Our corporate IT guys mandated that we use virtualization as much as possible, even for the build machines. This caused significant increases in compile-time because the I/O to the large-scale NAS wasn't nearly as fast as a physical local disk.
Re:corporate policy (Score:2)
definately sounds like the wrong SAN for the purpose.
the SAN we use gives much better I/O than local disk, and the multipath 10gb iscsi gives quite the performance boost.
It's also possible your vm admins are overprovisioning the hosts your build machines are on. either intentionally or unintentially.
Re:corporate policy (Score:2)
Of course you can throw more iron at a problem. But bare to metal can be hard to beat. One thing to notice is that the response time of a SAN over the network can be considerably slower than a close to metal local file system. Even if the bandthwidth is better, you still can expierence speed diference.
Anyway, any policy without communicating the full reason of the policy (price/security/performance) can suck, especilly in large organisations.
Re: corporate policy (Score:2)
Re:corporate policy (Score:3)
Our corporate IT guys mandated that we use virtualization as much as possible, even for the build machines. This caused significant increases in compile-time because the I/O to the large-scale NAS wasn't nearly as fast as a physical local disk.
Virtualization platforms offer so many solutions for that problem (direct access to SSD/local storage, direct access to optimized SAN storage, etc) that this is basically all the implementer's fault. Your virtualization is bad and you should feel bad.
Re:corporate policy (Score:2)
Your virtualization is bad and you should feel bad.
I'm pretty sure the phrase "significant increases in compile-time" is not an expression of joy and pleasure. Unless GPP really enjoys office chair fencing [xkcd.com].
It's far more likely that the people who suffer most from these bad decisions and worse implementations are also the ones who have the least say in the bad decisions and worse implementations. That's certainly my experience. Management tends to be more impressed by a really low-cost BOM than arguments that cheaping out on storage will damage developer productivity. Reality is pretty Dilbertian that way.
Re:corporate policy (Score:3)
I do software consulting. I create a new VM for each new client. My host is my "day to day" programs (like e-mail) and then I keep my client's stuff isolated from any other client. I think if I ever went back to working for a single company, I'd probably have a similar model where each project was worked on in a VM.
Re:corporate policy (Score:2)
Our corporate IT guys mandated that we use virtualization as much as possible, even for the build machines. This caused significant increases in compile-time because the I/O to the large-scale NAS wasn't nearly as fast as a physical local disk.
NAS is definitely the wrong application.
You want SAN, a semi decent SAN connected by fibre will be faster than SSD's on a SATA 3 connections. Plus you get the the other advantages of SAN's (redundancy, high availability). As a sysadmin I once maintained a few build and test VM's running from a AX4 and had zero complaints, which is odd for developers, they normally complain about everything. They were happy to have their source control virtualised too, after their physical box went tits up and they had no source control for 2 days.
Properly set up and provisioned, virtualised boxes can be just as good, if not better than physical ones for build and test.
One thing we did do was set up additional boxes for different projects, we had a standard test test/dev template and could deploy new VM's from that, ready to use in 1 hour. This became so popular we had to put limits on what they were allowed to have at any one time (X VM's and Y GB of storage, we were generous, but the infrastructure needed to be shared with the entire business).
NAS is not for high I/O applications. This is where documents, logos and cat videos sit.
Re:corporate policy (Score:2)
It doesn't help though that a lot of NAS vendors advertise their NAS products as being compatible with VMWare and etc. for the purposes of storing virtual machine virtual disk files. The result is not pretty.
I do put low priority VM's on a NAS. Mainly stuff like low priority file and application servers that have little to no I/O requirements.
Re:corporate policy (Score:2)
Re:corporate policy (Score:2)
This is baloney and absolutely proven FALSE. I wish I could share my data, but at scale of thousands of machines, with a properly configured SAN infrastructure this is completely developer FUD/bunk.
My plan (Score:3)
I'm not planning to update my PC anytime soon, but for my next PC, I plan to get a CPU with as many cores as I can obtain (today, an AMD FX 8-core) and install Linux as my main OS. Any gaming I can't do with WINE I will run through a VM running Windows 7.
Re:My plan (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:My plan (Score:2)
Re:Be prepared to play a lot of old games... (Score:2)
Re:Be prepared to play a lot of old games... (Score:3)
That's not exactly a big punishment: It's not like great games stop being great games just because they're old. For example, just last weekend I spent a couple of hours enjoying Thief, which came out in 1998 (premise: sneak around taking everything of value without anyone noticing, or alternately sneak up behind unsuspecting people and smack them on the back of the head).
In fact, by being well behind the times, I get to enjoy higher quality games, because a lot of other gamers have already separated the wheat from the chaff.
Re:Be prepared to play a lot of old games... (Score:2)
Seconded. Was playing Rise of the Triad last weekend, and having a blast.
Re: Be prepared to play a lot of old games... (Score:2)
Local vs. Hosted (Score:2)
The question doesn't really specify much about how VMs are used. I use a laptop and desktop with straight-booted Windows and Ubuntu for a variety of things, when I want a dedicated machine (normally either for video games or something CPU/GPU intense like Image/Video processing), but I host local VMs on those machines when I'm multi-tasking (which normally means programming or data manipulation on one hand and Netflix and web browsing on another).
BUT, I only use VMs on my "servers"... boxes with more consistent usage patterns, anyway. Mostly at this point I use Amazon EC2 which is virtual but kind of cheating since its easy to treat the machines like standalone remotely hosted entities. Still, technically that's all-VM all-the-time.
Problem with the poll (Score:3)
Is it referring to our professional responsibilities, or to our personal computing habits?
At work we use VMs for a good percentage of our servers. At home, though, my VM use is quite limited.
Re:Problem with the poll (Score:3)
I'm about ready move all of my web browsers into VMs because the state of PC security is so abysmal right now.
Missing option.... (Score:2)
I have transformed my entire data-center from 1to1 physical servers to large clusters hosting many virtual machines on both VMware and Hyper-V.
and a previous poster nailed it on the head
Where's the "I am sick of these thinly veiled Dice bullshit marketing polls" option? I'm done voting in these things.
Re:Missing option.... (Score:3)
My entire infrastructure is virtualized.
I have transformed my entire data-center from 1to1 physical servers to large clusters hosting many virtual machines on both VMware and Hyper-V.
and a previous poster nailed it on the head
Where's the "I am sick of these thinly veiled Dice bullshit marketing polls" option? I'm done voting in these things.
Why do they need to encourage you to vote, when they can get you to lay out exactly what your position is on virtualization?
Virtual Workstations (Score:2)
Also, most computers can be booted from a Linux Live CD, hit the VM and let me do what I want to do without actually installing anything on said computer. So, if I'm visiting my dad, who's running Windoze, I can still play with my VM.
Finally, using VirtualBox to run WinXP to VPN into the office, on a host machine running Linux, works quite well. If you want to check something on the Internet WITHOUT the VPN trying to route it through the company's proxy server, fire up the browser directly on the host machine, outside of the VM. If you want to hit stuff on the company network, fire up the browser inside the VM.
I foresee a day when more and more people are doing the latter one. Any virus infections on the host machine will have to be very intelligent to infect the VM, and vice versa. And, heaven help you if you ever end up in a situation where you need to log onto multiple VPNs at the same time. Different VMs, different VPNs, one host to rule them all.
Re:Virtual Workstations (Score:2)
I wonder how hard it would be to write a virus to detect vmware tools or virtualbox guest extensions and use it to infect the host.
Re:Virtual Workstations (Score:2)
There is malware that actually doesn't run if it is on a VM. This is in an effort to make reverse engineering/monitoring of the malware more difficult. I always thought that it also severely limited it's target, but if you are going after end-users, the limitation is probably irrelevant.
Re:Virtual Workstations (Score:2)
Full throttle virtualization for the most part... (Score:5, Insightful)
All my boxes have some type of hypervisor on them, be it a level 1 hypervisor like on my home desktop box that runs Windows Server 2012, or a level 2 hypervisor like my MacBook running Parallels.
Lots of advantages with this type of setup:
1: I can do my Web browsing in a VM on a remote machine, so if the remote Web browser is attacked, it would take some doing to get to a machine that is just acting as a keyboard/monitor. Plus, I can roll back the compromised snapshot. Not 100%, but good enough for most tasks.
2: Snapshots. Bad Windows patch won't allow the box to boot, roll back to previous snapshot. No reinstalling or restores necessary.
3: Compartmentalization. I have some old rickety utilities that need an older environment to run, and the energy cost of an older PC is pointless compared to running it on a newer box.
4: Hardware independence. I upgrade my VM server, copy the virtual disks, and the VMs don't know/care.
5: Backups. If I copy the VM and its drives somewhere, I know it is backed up completely.
6: Adding more hosts. I like having different machines for different tasks, so having multiple VM disk images stored on a deduplicating filesystem allows for applications to be separate but without wasting disk space for each separate instance of the OS.
7: Security. I toss the VM's image files in a TC volume. This provides decent security, although not perfect (still vulnerable to Firewire RAM snooping, cold RAM attacks, etc.)
Re:Full throttle virtualization for the most part. (Score:3)
Re:Full throttle virtualization for the most part. (Score:3)
1: I can do my Web browsing in a VM on a remote machine, so if the remote Web browser is attacked, it would take some doing to get to a machine that is just acting as a keyboard/monitor. Plus, I can roll back the compromised snapshot. Not 100%, but good enough for most tasks.
You can sandbox this sort of thing just as well with paravirtualization without requiring a full on virtual machine.
2: Snapshots. Bad Windows patch won't allow the box to boot, roll back to previous snapshot. No reinstalling or restores necessary.
Snapshots are something that should be included directly in the filesystem or volume manager, and on many systems, they are. Virtualization is not a requirement to achieve this. Boot into a recovery tool, roll back the filesystem, and you're golden.
3: Compartmentalization. I have some old rickety utilities that need an older environment to run, and the energy cost of an older PC is pointless compared to running it on a newer box.
Assuming there is some amount of kernel level interfacing that means you can't simply run the utility in a separate environment with legacy libraries, this is an acceptable use of virtual machines.
4: Hardware independence. I upgrade my VM server, copy the virtual disks, and the VMs don't know/care.
Unless they require some special hardware configuration, for things like special IO cards or graphics access, then the applications shouldn't care anyway, and paravirtualization as simple as a chroot is plenty. Of course, if they do require some special hardware configuration, then virtualization often isn't going to do the job either. If the application does care because it is using a machine fingerprint to control licensing, then shame on you for violating your licensing terms, and doubly shame on you for patronizing software with such draconian behavior.
5: Backups. If I copy the VM and its drives somewhere, I know it is backed up completely.
Same as snapshotting above, no virtualization needed.
6: Adding more hosts. I like having different machines for different tasks, so having multiple VM disk images stored on a deduplicating filesystem allows for applications to be separate but without wasting disk space for each separate instance of the OS.
Snapshotting combined with cloning, still no virtualization needed.
7: Security. I toss the VM's image files in a TC volume. This provides decent security, although not perfect (still vulnerable to Firewire RAM snooping, cold RAM attacks, etc.)
You can just as well TrueCrypt the host. I don't see how this has anything to do with virtualization.
Re:Full throttle virtualization for the most part. (Score:2)
Performance is actually decent. However I'm doing tasks that are not CPU or I/O intensive, such as browsing the Web or editing documents needed for a specific project. If I needed something that required a lot of IOPS, I'd probably be attaching a volume directly to the VM for that, or just going bare metal.
The VMWare Workstation built in encryption is nice. I just wish it carried to ESXi and their other products. It would provide peace of mind just in case someone broke into my place and stole my machines. The hardware would be gone, but I'd be fairly sure that an offline VM would not be something a burglar or fence can access.
If I were to pick a level 1 hypervisor, I'd give the nod to ESXi, except that it is rather picky about hardware. On the other hand, I'm wondering how Windows Server 2012 R2 will fare with the deduplication of VM disks. That should go a ways to save space.
A few tasks, including gaming! (Score:2)
Unfortunately not all games work on Linux. Even the ones that do, don't all work on Scientific Linux. You can get quite far without VMs, using chroot environments, and I do this to run the Ubuntu userland and Steam.
For Windows-based games I obviously have to break out the VM. I just installed a second graphics card in my computer, and now have a Radeon 6770 that's assigned to a Windows VM with PCI passthrough. It boots, but I can't use it regularly due to some other hardware that's incompatible with IOMMU. With any luck I can get Windows performance close to native, with the convenience of running other stuff in the background in Linux, and being able to switch the screens using a KVM switch. I'll also have the Windows images on a RAID array with dual SSD caches. This could also be good for Linux gaming if maintaining a chroot is too much work. Obviously, I'm not 100 % sure that it will work.
VMs are also great to produce clean OS environments, for reproducing bugs or restoring configurations that get messed up. I also use a VM all the time for an instant messenger application.
So I use VMs for specialised tasks, but the existence of VMs does make my world a much better place
What the tool was designed for (Score:2)
I use VMs, but only for a few specialized tasks
Isn't that what VMs are for? That's like saying, "I use commas but only for specialized tasks." :p
Re:What the tool was designed for (Score:2)
I use VMs, but only for a few specialized tasks
Isn't that what VMs are for? That's like saying, "I use commas but only for specialized tasks." :p
Depends, As a sysadmin, I run VM's all the time. Most of my datacentre is virtualised and we're working on getting everything we can off of physical boxes into blades that are taking up 1/4 of the space. 2 blade chassis have almost replaced 2 racks of servers. The only things we cant virtualise are the firewalls (we could really, but we've chosen not to). Even out mail filter appliance is virtual now.
Worksations are going to be the last bastion of bare metal OS's in my life. I suspect in a few years that'll be down to just my personal gaming desktop.
90% virtualized (Score:2)
My only physical machines are a handful of infrastructure boxes and some boxes that run Oracle software that's not licensed in a manner compatible with virtualization (OBIEE and Oracle database EE), everything else is a VM. I'd be doing VDI but I just can't find anything approaching a positive ROI and so we still do physical desktops, I was hoping one of the VM on desktop with sync to VDI players would work out but either technical problems or pricing have kept me from adopting them.
gung ho.. (Score:2)
Quickbooks (Score:2)
Vista actually seems to run better in the VM than it did on it's own....
Even my virtual hosts are virtual (Score:3)
Turtles, all the way down...
Dev tools (Score:2)
Missing option (Score:2)
I like virtualization better than cloud (Score:2)
databases (Score:2)
Virtualisation for some reason does wonders for flat storage of many millions of text files and brings the search times (if they even complete on the host!) from approaching infinite to a few seconds.
You didn't mention z/VM, you insensitive clods! (Score:2)
Hey I saw a Virtual Box! (Score:2)
Where's the.... (Score:2)
... "my MacBook Pro has 9 VMs on it right now, 3 of which are powered on, and I build clouds for a living" choice? ;)
or even ... "Are you kidding? My VMs have VMs in them."
The Coma Problem (Score:2)
I have a number of virtual machines on my Mac that I run under Parallels including various versions of Linux and Windows. While they all perform very well and periodically I even have several running at once, the one thing that really gets me is the Windows VMs. I don't use them all that often, and when I wake them up it's like waking them from a coma. There's a lull for a bit then, it suddenly becomes aware that there's hundreds of updates for everything under the sun. Windows are popping up, the system tray twinkles and bubbles, ... it's as if if it awoke in a new century and panicked when it saw wireless phones with cat videos but no flying cars.
Me or my Company? (Score:2)
Me, I use them only for specific purposes. The company on the other hand thinks that thin provisioning means millions of free hosts. <*shrug*> I get a pay check either way, but you won't catch me recommending VMs for anything but testing.
Virtualization? Meh... (Score:2)
Obviously it has it's uses, but for my personal use I've never found a valid reason for using a virtual machine. At least not in the past couple years, as Linux hardware support has greatly improved. I mean, I could use it to make a machine portable, but I only transfer to new hardware every three or four years, so that doesn't seem worth the performance hit. I could use it to run Windows apps on my Linux system, but the last time I *needed* to run a Windows-only app was...........never. Sure, there's occasionally a game that I'd like to play, but my system isn't powerful enough to run games in a VM, and I don't particularly want to use a laptop for that anyway so I keep my old desktop as a dual-boot that just stays in Windows for the duration of those rare gaming binges.
I just graduated college, I live alone, and I have FOUR computers in my apartment (five if you count my work laptop -- old laptop, new laptop, old desktop, and Raspberry Pi media center...soon to expand with a Beaglebone or something)...I don't need to split hardware devices, I need to combine them! Forget virtual machines, I need Beowulf clusters! Though I guess that would still be a virtual machine of sorts...
Re:NO physical machines? None at all? (Score:2)
How can someone have "NO" physical machines and be talking about virtualization?
They are just using a dumb terminal to display a virtual machine hosted in someone else's data center (i.e. the cloud).
Re:WRT??? (Score:2)