Yep you heard it right, MS Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition is now a free download from Microsoft. Find it here

Token "Free VMWare Server" link:

http://www.vmware.com/products/server/

And soon with AMD's Pacifica .. we could use Xen to get near native speeds.

As usual, Microsoft is playing catch-up :)

last edited by parabol at 20:55:15 05/Apr/06

vm is the future. it will be the preferred way of installing applications with tricky dependencies. instead of sending out a box of cds to the client, just image the install and send them the image.

hehehehe those microsoft guys need to get with the program lol
firefox > ie lol

I'm going to give this ago, as well as VMWare if I can be bothered. Although VM looks a bit more complex with its 11tybillion different versions of Server, Virtual Centre....

already running a xen installation here at work :) So much *faster* than UML.

Cool that its free; virtual stuff seems great for testing and development but I'm scared people are going to get addicted to it and start wanting to use it in production. Then everyone will have to have hardware upgrades because of the overhead, and global temperatures will rise further and the ice caps will melt and then we'll all die. So, you see, I don't think it is all that great.

One of our clients uses virtual servers for some of their production systems - a Blackberry server and SQL Server 7 for a legacy application that doesn't talk to anything newer.

Even though it's a good idea for financial reasons to use virtuals for these type of services, in practice it's f***ed. Both servers peg out the virtual host constantly and the client just isn't interested in purchasing real hardware because they aren't core applications.

:(

Then everyone will have to have hardware upgrades because of the overhead, and global temperatures will rise further and the ice caps will melt and then we'll all die. So, you see, I don't think it is all that great.

You forget that once the global temperatures rise the dragons will return!

whats wrong with using virtual servers as productions servers??? get 2 or 3 beffy machines and run several servers of it, we do it at work. The main benefit is that if your hardware goes down you can move the image to another identical machine and get going again in no time. And if you have all your images on external scsi devices then all it takes in some configuration changes and you can view the data on another machine, and off you go.

whats wrong with using virtual servers as productions servers???

There is significant overhead involved in virtualisation. You could be using that wasted CPU power for something else if you don't really need virtualisation.

The main benefit is that if your hardware goes down you can move the image to another identical machine and get going again in no time

At work we just use high-availability hardware/software on real machines, which automagically syncs disks, takes over IPs, etc .. and results in very little downtime or maintenance.

Though we do use virtualisation for our R&D linux projects. Very useful.

last edited by parabol at 18:01:37 06/Apr/06

how do you create images to use on this virtual machine thingermajig? or do you have to download them or something?

Create a new virtual machine, create virtual disks (which just map to one file on the host system) and start it up. By default it should also assign your real CDROM to your virtual machines CDROM.

Chuck in your Windows/Linux/Whatever CD in your host CD drive and your virtual machine should boot off it.

that ticman guy sure is a geek

You love it Geek style

haha, crusher is upset someone is out-geeking him.

im dumb about this virtual stuff, ive installed the trial a few months ago but couldnt figure out the use of it

ive installed the trial a few months ago but couldnt figure out the use of it

the only thing I found difficult was finding the hotkey to return the mouse curser back to the desktop :/

blah posted a link to this http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1835343 on SA - application virtualization. I thought this was very, very cool - I'd really like to do this for some of my apps that aren't performance-critical because it should would make it easier to deal with backups and stuff. Sick to death of DLL hell and registry and config files and all that crap.

Or testing/development.. multiple versions of the same crappy Windows apps on the one machine.

the only thing I found difficult was finding the hotkey to return the mouse curser back to the desktop :/

no i meant i cant see the use of it, maybe i missed something