I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how best to organize my work. Since I have been laid off I have had to work very hard at getting side-jobs to make the money I need to make. With this, I have found that I have to sell myself as someone who can work in just about any area of the software world (whether it be C#, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, etc). After all, there are thousands of bids going into every single job position and there are probably even more bids going on the free-lancer websites. With so many bids on so many jobs/projects I can’t really focus on one specific area. So, I have spent a large deal of time brushing up my “almost-forgotten” languages such as PHP and Java.
However, coming from 6-7 years in the C#/.Net (Aka: the microsoft)Â world, it can be difficult working in these other languages that are far more suited for linux environments. Let’s also not forget that I like my games (like Counter-Strike, Diablo, Prince of Persia, etc). It just so happens that these games don’t work very well on linux environments. I started pondering how it is that I can solve this issue without having to have two seperate machines. My friend (the same friend that bad-mouths my windows desktops) mentioned that he uses VMWare for working with multiple operating systems so I decided to give it a try.
At first I considered just using the workstation software that runs locally on your machine and allows you to install multiple OS’s on your machine. However, after I gave consideration to the how much space I wanted each OS to take up, how many different OS’s I wanted to install as well as where I wanted to be able to access the instances from I decided that it would be better to use the VMWare Server software. So, I installed the server software on my windows server and started out creating a VMWare Linux instance. The installation process was fairly simple… The setup process even installed the drivers necessary to provide network connections to the separate VM instances.
Creating the actual instances wasn’t quite as easy for me. In hein sight I believe the VMWare server software is a bit un-obvious with the process for installing the different instances. Mainly because when you create a new VM instance it gives you an option to specify which OS you want the VM instance to represent. To me, this meaned that the OS should automatically be prepared on the instance after it is done allocating the space necessary for the instance. However, this was not the case. After I created the instance (and specified the instance to be Linux Redhat) and started the instance up on the server you could see that it was working to some degree because you could watch the BIOS screen load. This wasn’t enough though because it continued to tell me that there was no bootable disc inserted on the drive and no OS was installed. Even after hunting around on google for a while there didn’t seem to be any good tutorials on how to create VMWare instances.
Eventually I realized that I just had to install an OS on the instance from scratch. I ended up downloading a linux Ubuntu installation ISO from a torrent site. I found an option to specify a file to load as a disc in the VMWare instance and specified the downloaded ISO as the file to load. It was very similar to how virtual drives work such as Daemon Tools. As soon as I did that and restarted the VM instance it detected the bootable disc and allowed me to install Ubuntu without problems. Before I knew it I was up and running with a VMWare instance of Ubuntu on my server.
Then after downloading the client softare for VMWare I could connect (using windows authentication) to my server and stop/start/pause/control any instannced VM instances.
Now, once I get my new laptop I will be able to install the VMWare client on my laptop and will be able to control the same VM instances from both my desktop and laptop. I could, potentially, even access my VMWare server from the road using a no-ip.com-like service. On that note though, I would be concerned about the speed of the connection. I wonder whether or not my internet connection would be enough to make a smooth VMWare experience… If it is a problem I believe I would buy a USB drive that I could take on the road. The USB drive could hold the VMWare instances on it and I could swap out the drive from my server to the laptop whenever I needed to go somewhere. This would allow me to have as many different OS’s as I needed wherever I needed them.
All-in-all I found VMWare to be reasonably simple to install and use. I do, however, wish that there was more information available on the VMWare instance installation process (such as the fact that you need to download the ISO for the OS you want to install and the fact that just selecting the type of OS from the VM instance installation screen does not actually mean that OS is installed by default). I look forward to getting my laptop and trying my theory out on traveling with VMWare.