virtualization
On the eve of the Windows 7 release candidate, Microsoft announced that Windows 7 will include a fully licensed, virtualized copy of Windows XP: XP Mode consists of the Virtual PC-based virtual environment and a fully licensed copy of Windows XP. It will be made available, for free, to users
virtualization
My employer, Vertigo Software, graciously hosted this blog for the last year. But as blog traffic has grown, it has put a noticeable and increasing strain on our bandwidth. Even on an average day, blog traffic consumes a solid 30 percent of our internet connection– and much more if something
virtualization
If you use virtual machines at all, you should have the single most important virtual machine performance tip committed to heart by now: always run your virtual machines from a separate physical hard drive: [the] biggest performance win is to put the virtual hard disks on separate disk spindles from
hardware
One of our best servers at work was inherited from a previous engagement for x64 testing: it’s a dual Opteron 250 with 8 gigabytes of RAM. Even after a year of service, those are still decent specs. And it has a nice upgrade path, too: the Tyan Thunder K8W
virtual machines
Now that Virtual PC is finally free, I've become obsessed with producing the smallest possible Windows XP Virtual PC image. It's quite a challenge, because a default XP install can eat up well over a gigabyte. Once you factor in the swapfile and other overhead, you&
virtualization
This article on AMD’s upcoming CPU support for hardware virtualization has the best description of virtualization I’ve read to date: In a modern-day virtualization system, a thin layer of software, called the virtual machine manager or hypervisor (both terms are common) runs on the processor. The VMM creates
compression
I set up a number of Windows XP SP2 Virtual PC base images today. A WinXP SP2 clean install, after visiting Windows Update, is 1.70 gigabytes. Building up a few baseline images like this can chew up a substantial amount of disk space and network bandwidth. So, taking a
virtualization
My friend Josh Carlisle was kind enough to host this website during my move to California. Josh set me up with a Microsoft Virtual Server slice of Windows 2003 Standard on his Xeon 2.8 server. I’m currently running a WIMP (Windows, IIS, MySql, Perl) configuration which I was
microsoft
I’m working with Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2004 again. Since the last time I discussed VPC, Microsoft released the essential Virtual PC 2004 Service Pack 1, which addresses a lot of outstanding issues, particularly compatibility with SP2 and newer AMD/Intel processors. If you start delving into VPC, I