Desktop Virtualization: Into the Virtual Fray

I’ve been a huge fan of virtualization for almost 10 years now, beginning with VMware’s first product, which I tried as a beta version.  Since then, I’ve tried other VMware products, and Xen, trying to capitalize on the server end by running multiple VMs on a single rackmounted machine (this works quite well, by the way, but also has disadvantages).

Recently, I’ve been playing around with other desktop virtual machine managers, trying to install as many operating systems as I can onto my trusty laptop (a Dell Inspiron 1525, with 3GB RAM, 100G hard drive, Intel Core2 Duo 1.83GHz, running Windows Vista), to see what could be accomplished in the way of running something on my machine without having to re-configure it into a multi-boot mess.  The point of this exercise is to gain the benefits of another operating system without having to reboot, wasting some time while I wait for booting to complete.

I’m using Sun’s VirtualBox, which is actually a pretty darn good desktop virtual machine manager.  Setup is easy, configuration of a virtual machine is fairly straightforward, it doesn’t take up much space, and best of all it doesn’t cost anything. VirtualBox can take advantage of VT-x/AMD-V if your chipset supports that function.  My Dell laptop does not, so I’m relying only on software virtualization.  A cool thing about VirtualBox is that not only will the software allow me to easily switch between virtual machine and regular host desktop (Windows Vista in my case), without ‘escaping’ the virtual machine, but it has a function called “seamless mode”.  Seamless mode incorporates windows from a virtual machine desktop into the hosted desktop.  Seamless mode is only possible if the guest OS (the operating system in the virtual machine) is supported by VirtualBox Guest Additions.

Figure 1. Non-seamless VirtualBox

In Figure 1, you can see that the entire Xubuntu Linux desktop is a window on the Windows Vista desktop.  I am able to switch between the two via mouse, though the Alt+Tab trick doesn’t work as well because Xubuntu Linux captures my Alt+Tab keypresses and switches windows within the virtual machine desktop.  After pressing the right Ctrl key, Alt+Tab works, treating the Xubuntu virtual desktop as an application window on the Windows Vista desktop.

Figure 2. Seamless VirtualBox

Figure 2 displays that there is no Xubuntu Linux desktop.  It has been incorporated into the Windows Vista desktop.  You can also see near the bottom of the screen that the Linux taskbar that was at the bottom of the virtual desktop in Figure 1 is now at the bottom of my Windows Vista desktop in Figure 2.

Disclaimer:  No, I do not normally run Internet Explorer.  I only had it open during the screenshots to showcase that it is actually WIndows Vista, since I have a non-standard Vista desktop theme.

Another cool feature of VirtualBox Guest Additions is the ability to have a shared folder between the virtual machine guest OS (Xubuntu Linux, for example) and the host (Windows Vista in my case).  This particular feature, I *love*.

I’m often “printing” certain things into a Postscript file, converting it into a PDF, and archiving the PDF for historical filekeeping purposes (think: receipts you get from websites).  In Linux, I “print to file”, convert the Postscript file into PDF, and then archive the PDF file.  In Windows, this is not as cut and dry.  I can certainly “print to file” as Postscript, but converting to PDF is a bit more involved.  To overcome this, I have a Linux virtual machine running with a guest-to-host share in VirtualBox; Windows Vista sees this as a folder, and the Linux virtual machine sees this as a mounted directory.  I can “print to file” from Windows directly into the VirtualBox share, go into Linux, and “ps2pdf” the file, and it gets written as a PDF in the same place next to the original Postscript file.  From that, I can either view the PDF in Linux, or view it in Vista with Adobe Acrobat Reader.  There might be easier ways to accomplish this only in Windows, but I’m more familiar with the Linux tools, and in Linux I don’t have to launch a separate application.

So far, in VirtualBox, I have created virtual machines for Xubuntu, openSUSE v10.3, openSolaris v2008.11, Haiku, and even WIndows 7.  Haiku runs a bit slowly, though.  Each of these virtual machines have about 512MB RAM and no more than 6GB of hard drive space.  Keep in mind that the amount of memory you allocate for a virtual machine gets used by that virtual machine when it is running.  Similarly, hard drive space you declare for a virtual machine becomes occupied by that virtual machine’s hard drive on the physical machine in the form of a file.  My meager Dell Inspiron with 3GB RAM and 100GB hard drive, can handle the hard drive space and a few virtual machines running at the same time with a few signs of stress, but nothing major.

My next stop on this Virtual Desktop adventure is with some of the older operating systems I’ve used in the past, working on this laptop.