VirtualBox

Recently I upgraded from Fedora 9 to F11. With the upgrade, my VMWare Server setup has had nothing but problems. I've limped along, but finally bit the bullet and learned VirtualBox. VBox is free and OSS. It supports branching or forking snapshots, meaning you can have thousands of VMs taking up very little disk space (just the differentials from the base os or wherever you fork/branch). This is a feature you need VMWare Workstation (pay) to enjoy.

So just what is VirtualBox or these "Virtual Machine" technologies? In short, they give you the ability to run many operating systems (Windows, Linux) at the same time on the same physical hardware, plus many other options (like redundancy and such on larger systems).

One use I have for Virtual Machines is to run Windows in a VM Guest without having to run Windows as my main OS, and never having to reboot ("dual booting") to Windows. I do this because often there are proprietary things I need to do that won't work on Linux for one reason or another (VPN software that only works on Windows is the primary reason, or software that requires Internet Explorer and/or ActiveX or something else which IEs 4 Linux don't support or do well). I also use Quickbooks for my business needs (I use GnuCash for my personal needs, but I need to be able to quickly get my bookkeeper what they need and with Quickbooks I can talk the same language without having to learn too much accounting beyond the basics). I need Quickbooks to just work, and I don't have time to deal with it breaking under Linux, as if it is broken, I don't bill out customers. VirtualBox allows me to run Quickbooks in Windows XP in a very stable way - I use snapshots so that my Windows XP OS never changes, only the separate partition that contains my actual Quickbooks data files ever changes, but that's another story for another day. Another advantage I have running Quickbooks this way is that my VM Guest for it is never allowed Internet access, so it is virtually hack proof (essentially you'd need to have physical access to my laptop to get to my Quickbooks).