dual booting

[Christopher Browne]

On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 3:25 PM, William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I admit "virtualization" is useful for application testing.  But, it's useless for
> hardware testing (like the wireless problem above).  And, I'm not sure about
> its cost-effectiveness that's advertised. Netbooks/nettops are getting better
> and cheaper by the months.
>
> My computer is almost max'ed out... full 8GB memory, all Samsung Spinpoint
> F3 harddisks (which are the best of non-SSD kinds).  I could upgrade to
> quad-core, but even if I get 4x linear improvement, it won't be enough.
> I guess I can go with a full-loaded i7 machine.  But, my VW diesel doesn't
> need a block heater.

VMs "buy you" a couple of fairly valuable things, albeit things not
related to hardware testing, or highly improved performance.

You can create an environment for a particular application (e.g. - web
apps, Java apps) which are readily duplicable.

Good for scaling: once you have set it up once, you can save the VM
and use it to deploy 8x when you need that kind of scalability.

That's also useful for testing: you can create a more production-like
environment than used to be possible.

It's good for manageability: if you have 8 web apps you need to
deploy, you can use 8 VMs, separating the messes, rather than having
to have some hideous Apache configuration to get them to share a
machine.  There's a two-way street there...  Since their
configurations do not interact (as would be the case if sharing an
Apache instance), each is in principle simpler.  OTOH, you may do
fancier/messier things inside those VMs, but at least, there's nothing
messy in the "visible" aspects of the interaction.

Useful for "legacy":  If there's one app that needs some crufty old
version of Mandrake, then you can keep the crufty old version of
Mandrake as a VM, backed up and everything, and can upgrade all of
your "host OSes" as needed - no need to keep boxes running hideously
old versions of Linux just because an app or two expect that.

The savings aren't necessarily in getting an extra ounce of
performance; sometimes they're in being able to keep host OSes up to
date (against security attacks and such) without forcing crufty apps
to break.
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