I’ve been virtualizing machines the home network for many years. The benefits are simply huge (but relax – I’ll not go into them in detail here). Suffice it to say that it beats the snot out of stack of old PCs with their attendant noise and energy consumption.
The server I built on a shoestring one August afternoon many years ago has (ahem) served us well. A mile-high overview of the hardware includes an NVIDEA motherboard from BFG, several GB of commodity RAM, a SATA RAID card from Silicon Image driving a handful of 3.5-inch SATA drives, and an IDE boot drive. The mini-tower case – told you I cheaped out – is somewhat dense inside so there are extra fans to keep the heat in check. The host OS has been Windows 2000 Server Service Pack 4.
Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s a 32-bit OS on 64-bit hardware. A nice chunk of RAM is ‘lost’ to insufficient address space right off the bat. I figured to upgrade the OS one day but never quite got around to it. The virtualization software is VMware Server, which I’ve been using since the beginning. Their current version is 2.0.0 Build 116503 (wow, 2008, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth). The guest OSs are a mix of Linux and Windows servers handling core dedicated roles as well as a changing mix of experimental/test/research stuff: DOS, Windows 3.1, Chrome OS, OS/2 Warp (OMG what a hack that was!), a couple of OTS appliances, more. What can I say? I’ve got an interest in history. Besides, the look on my kid’s face when he sees an ancient OS actually running (as opposed to just static screen shots on some Web page) is worth it.
Anyway, there are lots of problems with this setup. VMware Server, their free product, is getting long in the tooth. The Web-based interface doesn’t work with the Chrome browser; it’s one of the few things that continues to force me to use IE. Sometimes the service side of the interface goes MIA altogether. The 32-bit Win2K is finally hopelessly out of date, absolutely no more updates. The list goes on and on.
So every now and again I look around for alternatives. The last serious contender was VMware’s ESXi. The idea of a supported bare-metal virtualization platform sure sounded appealing! I spent a day or two experimenting but ended up dismissing it. Getting it to run on the (albeit weak) hardware proved do-able but not without difficulties. In the end it just seemed too fragile for the long-term. I chalked it up to more trouble than it was worth, restored the old setup and got on with life.
The October 2010 issue of Communications of the ACM carried an interesting article, Difference Engine: Harnessing Memory Redundancy in Virtual Machines. Excellent article! A side effect of reading it led me to think again about the clunky mess humming away in the basement. And it was at roughly that time when another interesting article came through the news flow, How do I add a second drive to a Windows XP virtual machine running in VirtualBox? [link is dead]
Hmmm, VirtualBox. I had looked at VirtualBox a long time ago. I grabbed a current release and installed it on my desktop. Wow, it’s apparently matured a great deal since I last paid attention! I found it intuitive and fast to not only create and use new guests but also to simply import and run my existing VMs. (Well, okay, so there were a few gotchas, but no showstoppers.) Yes, this could be a contender for the basement server!
I pulled out an old laptop for some preliminary testing. I loaded it up with Ubuntu Server 10.10, installed VirtualBox and parked it in the basement. The goal? Well, VirtualBox is very easy to control through its GUI but I’d need to learn to run it entirely via command line and build my confidence for a smooth migration. I just  knew I’d run into problems along the way – nothing’s ever as easy as it looks at first glance – and I wanted to be able to anticipate and solve most of them in advance.
As usual, the ‘net came through as a truly incredible learning resource and I made copious use of it along the way. But every situation is different. By documenting my work in a series of articles, well, maybe it’ll help some wayward soul have an easier time of it.
