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by Jared Richardson.
Original Post: Virtualization Rocks!
Feed Title: 6th Sense Analytics
Feed URL: http://www.6thsenseanalytics.com/?feed=rss
Feed Description: The 6th Sense Analytics corporate blog
A few weeks ago I had Yet Another Hardware issue with a machine. My home lan server is a little old, but still fine for home use. It's a dual Opteron with two gigs of memory... overkill for a home server, but it's paid for. :) However, the power supply went out again... The box is three years old and I've replaced a few power supplies, the motherboard, a fan or two, the graphics card... You get the idea. This used to be my desktop and it's got a little wear and tear on it.
This time, for the first time ever with a hardware issue, Kubuntu let me down. I've got a NVidia 6800 GT card that won't run X in this box. Both Knoppix and XP run this configuration with no issues, so it's something in either Ubuntu or Kubuntu. I can't get either live CD or the previously installed Kubuntu version to work with this card. I've tried NVidia native drivers, nv drivers, etc... No joy.
So I went back to XP on the dual Opteron... and then I installed Parallels. (I have ~no~ issue with VMWare... I just can't figure out how to make a new VM and the download existing images take too long.) Also, I didn't run Parallels on Linux because it wanted to patch the kernel and the Knoppix kernel source isn't available as an apt-get, at least where I could easily find it.
I then created a new Kubuntu install in a Parallels virutal machine on my spiffy MacBook Pro... it has the magic virtualization bits in the CPU, so the install went much faster. However, when I was done, I copied over the Parallels image to my dual Opteron, started it up, and it all Just Worked.
The next time I have a hardware failure, all I have to do is copy over a single file. Granted, it'll be about 5 or 6 gigs, but I won't have to re-install Java, Ant, JSPWiki, Ruby, Rails, Jedit.... etc and so forth. All the cruft I'm wasting time with right now. I'll just get an operating system running, add Parallels, and go. I could use Linux, XP, Vista, OS X... it just won't matter anymore.
By the way, another nice feature about Parallels I like is that the disk image can grow. You cap the maximum size, but then it just uses what it needs. The operating system sees the maximum size, but only uses what you need. I'm told you lose a little in performance, but my 32 gig partition is only using three gigs on disk right now. :)
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