Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: I did the deed! http://www.vmware.com

Author:Brad Marsh
Posted:5/13/1999; 7:03:27 AM
Topic:Installing RedHat 6.0
Msg #:6161 (In response to 6058)
Prev/Next:6160 / 6162

Here's a quote from a posting to the PHP mailing list from Rasmus Lerdorf - this is waaaay cool!:

> At least this way, I can see which one I like best, and then get its > "official" boxed version.

One cool thing I have just started doing is to install many different distributions in something called virtual machines. Having to wipe out your machine each time you want to try a distribution is a pain. And especially for developers trying to make sure that their stuff builds and installs cleanly on as many systems as possible.

So, I am using vmware (www.vmware.com) to set up small virtual Intel machines. I have a PII-300 box w/ 128M of ram and I typically give a virtual machine either 32M or 64M of ram and fire it up. You can see one of my vm's starting up at:

http://www.lerdorf.on.ca/vm/snap1.gif

Inside this vm you can then install just about anything you can install on a normal Intel box. That includes Windows98, WindowsNT, Linux, etc.

Simply pop in a boot floppy or a CD and install just like you normally would. If you look at:

http://www.lerdorf.on.ca/vm/snap10.png

you can see 3 vm's running at the same time. One Win98 and two completely separate Linux vm's. Each one has its own ip and looks exactly like a host on my network here. You can run web servers in each one and access them from any of the others or from the underlying host OS (which is Linux RH-5.2).

It would be nice if some ISP's out there had a look at perhaps providing virtual server hosting this way. Provide customers with their own complete virtual machines. That way the customer could have full root access, recompile his kernel and basically do whatever he wanted and the ISP could still have multiple clients per machine and each client could run his own favourite (Intel-based) operating system. To illustrate this, feel free to:

telnet gizmo.lerdorf.on.ca

login: root password: hackme

This is a small vm running Linux RedHat-5.1. I have only assigned it 20M of ram and my cpu load is hovering right around 0.02 with it running and someone logged into it, so I don't even notice it. It will stay up until someone wipes it out. Login and poke around.

-Rasmus

Enjoy!

Brad




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