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An Overview of Virtualization
IndioMan writes to point us to an overview of virtualization — its history, an analysis of the techniques used over the years, and a survey of Linux virtualization projects. From the article: "Virtualization is the new big thing, if 'new' can include something over four decades old. It has been used historically in a number of contexts, but a primary focus now is in the virtualization of servers and operating systems. Much like Linux, virtualization provides many options for performance, portability, and flexibility."
Just wanted to point out that qemu can also do virtualisation on Linux, just like Vmware, with a closed-source kernel module. It works quite well too. http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/qemu-accel.htm l
I work at a small ISV which just bought SourceForge, Enterprise Edition which is an Apache/JBOSS/PostgreSql/CentOS app for managing SDLC. For a company of our size, they package this as a VMWare image. Installation is incredibly easy. I can definitely see how free virtualization can be a big boon to companies selling and/or consuming web applications for small deployments.
MOL is a true work of genius. Even on pretty old PPC hardware it functions with almost no slowdown. (Linux host, OS X and Linux clients). Compared to contemporaries it had no equal - the current generation of products on x86 are just starting to catch up. I'm most impressed with the way my powerbook can sleep (close the lid) under Linux and all of the hosted sessions quietly pause themselves with no problems. They even resume a network connection perfectly on waking up.
It'm glad to see similar happening on x86, finally, as it's one of the things that really made PPC based machines special. (There is some documentation for MOL and Kubuntu here.)
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
For the home user virtualization can be used as a separate PC to surf the net without fear of malware, when you are done surfing just restore the VM to the "clean" state, think "your pr0n browsing PC". You can also use it to test software before contaminating your host PC with stuff you decide not to keep. I visualize it as a sandbox to play in before messing up with the "real" system.
Check the vmware player appliances, there are lots of good ideas there, many of them are for business use but there are several that can be used at home.
For the developer / tester virtualization provides a set of target operating systems to test / debug the software on without need of having the actual physical hardware.
Of course, in the data center it is the next big thing, too many advantages to list here.
moi
Edit your
Add the following:
mks.enable3d = TRUE {- Requires acceleration on the host, because it passes things directly from the guest.
svga.vramSize = 67108864 {- This line increases the vram size, you might want to customize it.
vmmouse.present = FALSE {- This disables the 'absolute' pointing device in the guest OS (as applications that require directinput relative mode needs to turn off 'relative' mode in the guest). Note: If you unset this option, you should also turn off the preference for motion ungrabbing in the settings dialog
Unfortunately not all aspects of 3D acceleration on the guest are actually accelerated -- Which are some of the following:
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.