Virtual machines are virtually taking over the world. By itself a virtual machine is just a container that describes various resources such as memory, disk space, processor, and network card, and allocates them from a physical machine. As with a physical machine, it’s the software bits (the operating system and applications) that make a virtual machine usable. When you mix a virtual machine with real software you get a virtual appliance. Some complete Linux distributions as well as specialized apps are available as virtual appliances. Thanks to the ease in packaging one, there’s no shortage of virtual appliances around, if you know where to look.

Well, vmware.com is a great place to start.   I can’t say enough about this technology.  I’ve been a happy VMware user for a while now.  My main desktops are Xubuntu.  With the free VMplayer, I can run Windows in a virtual machine.  At the same time, I can try out different linuxes, some network monitoring machines, and whatever else strikes my fancy.  I have run three at the same time with the cpu meter barely moving.

With only the player you can create your own virtual machines (Google is your friend).  It’s done with small text files.   Windows seems to be better behaved as a virtual machine and it won’t eat anything else when it goes (and rest assured, it will go).

If you have a newer processor you can also do efficient virtualization with KVM and Qemu.  There’s a brief test that will tell you if your cpu will do this.  Again, Google is your friend.

VMplayer will work as-is on Windows and linux.  You can run either OS as a virtual machine on either host OS.   And you can’t argue with the price (it’s free).

Ask if you have any questions.