For those use cases, products such as VMware vCenter and other front ends to large virtualization servers become the tools of choice.įinally, it’s important to note that both VMware Workstation and Oracle VirtualBox have sites (the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace and, among others) from which users can download preconfigured VMs (also referred to as “appliances”) that have been assembled by the community, frequently to provide a stand-alone service (Web server, database, and so on). However, once you manage more than perhaps a dozen machines, these tools begin to lack the administration capabilities an IT site would want. VMware Workstation 11 enables you to manage some VMs remotely if they are running on VMware’s platform. Depending on the implementation, they are typically a set of deltas to be applied to the base VM.īoth products let users spin up and manage multiple VMs, but the management capabilities are distinctly limited. Snaphots are clonelike images taken at a particular moment in time. In terms of management, all products in this category enable users to build, clone, and take snapshots of VMs. The value of a given product derives equally from its VM management capabilities as it does from the quality, range, and performance of the hardware emulation.
This combination is a Type 2 hypervisor that must itself be hosted on a system running a full operating system. (There are other options, such as the open source Xen and the proprietary Hyper-V from Microsoft.) All of these products have the same fundamental design, which consists of a hypervisor (that creates and manages the VM) running on a hardware-emulation layer. Desktop virtualization for prosįor IT professionals, VMware Workstation and Oracle VirtualBox are the two leading options for creating and running VMs. In fact, malware analysis is a niche where desktop VMs are particularly favored because of the safety they provide: A VM that is infected will isolate the infection from the underlying host. Likewise, I use a VM when visiting potentially dangerous sites where the possibility of viral infection is higher. I have a VM that I use only for browsing to sites where security is a paramount concern: banking and other activities where malware would be particularly damaging. For example, I go through a VM when I want to be safe on the Web. In addition, any user errors in the VMs will have no lasting effects on their host desktops and notebooks. Not only do you save time, there is an assured uniformity of student experience.
If you’re going to train a large group of people on a piece of software, rather than have them download and install the software (and waste class time solving one-off installation issues), you can have attendees download the VM with the software already installed. The ability to take snapshots of running environments neatly solves the “unable to duplicate the bug” issue. In the event a defect is discovered, test engineers can take a snapshot of the VM, which they can then make available to the developers for remediation. Likewise, QA teams can test software in a VM that duplicates user or employee environments.
By running desktop VMs, developers can test code locally for portability before it’s checked into the source code management system. Testing for portability was the original scenario that made desktop virtualization popular, and it remains one of the core uses.
In IT, however, testing is one of the main drivers for adoption. (The top products for running Windows on the Mac are VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop for the Mac.) This is especially common on Macs in order to run software designed for Microsoft Windows - that is, desktop apps and games that haven’t been ported to the Mac. Most visible to the average consumer is the ability to run a different operating system on your local machine. The use cases for desktop virtualization are numerous and important. Here I compare the two leading products in this category: VMware Workstation and Oracle VirtualBox. While most of the impact has been felt in the data center and in the cloud, virtualization has also transformed IT work on the desktop, where it retains an important role. Few technologies have had a greater impact on business efficiency and IT productivity than virtualization.