Use Virtualization
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, virtualization would be it. The long-term benefits of virtualization have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.
OK, so which server OS virtualization platform are we going to use in our home data center? We’ve got a few choices:
VMware’s vSphere Hypervisor
VMware shows little regard for non Windows folk, requiring us to run the vSphere Client under a virtual machine. running windows. VMware can fuck right off.
Xen
I love Xen and am pleased to see debian is again supporting it. Amazon use Xen for their EC2 service and the last time I looked the majority of big virtual hosting providers were using it. A couple of years back I wrote a web interface for Xen called Xenium.
After all that gushing you’re probably going to think I’m recommending you use Xen right? Nope!
Oracle VirtualBox
I think my love for Xen caused me to ignore this option until recently.
VirtualBox is cross platform open source (GPL2) virtualization software for Linux, OSX, Windows and Solaris. It’s easy to install and someone has created a web frontend (phpvirtualbox) for it that looks just like the native GUI.
I’ve only just started exploring VirtualBox but for ease of installation, freedom and functionality it looks like a winner for hosting @ home.
Things I like about VirtualBox
- sound from Windows guest is playing on my Linux host
- mouse moves smoothly with no need to use keys to release
- easy to share a directory from host to guest (well…windows needed reboot)
- VRDP gives you RDP even when your OS doesn’t
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Hey, Mike!
Virtual Box is definitely go-to app for me. I’ve been using it on Mac to check websites in IE for several years now, and it’s been very smooth so far. The development is pretty active as well.
For Mac there’s also Parallels which is said to be good too, but I don’t see enough reason to move from an excellent freeware VB to it (AUD$99.95).
I love that it’s supported on all platforms and is totally free.
Have you managed to get shared directories working? I’m not having much luck accessing them from Windows.
I use Windows 7 Home which doesn’t have RDP built in so VirtualBox’s VRDP is a godsend.
Yup, I’ve got them on my Mac with WinXP in the box. Worked like charm. :)
Hi Mike,
I’m on VirtualBox and I’m very happy. I didn’t need to spend too much effort to get it up and going at all. I have one VM running on my pc acting as a web server (Listens on port 80). I am trying to get a second VM on my PC that I can use as a staging server. I have configured my router to do port forwarding for HTTP (3050) and SSH for the staging server, which is working since I can install with deprec/capistrano. I am running Rails3 with apache and passenger. After installing, I change the apache-vhost to listen in on *:3050 and I update ports.conf to Listen on 3050 as well. I restart the VM and try to load the page, but I get a Rails error message. A quick check in the logs shows the problem is that mysqld.sock cannot be found.
I don’t understand what’s up here. It worked fine when I just used the LAN IP address as the installation destination (192.168.1.13) and used that IP in the web browser (before any port forwarding attempts).
I haven’t been able to find any tips on how to configure alternate ports in deprec and changing it manually seems to break it. If you know how to overcome this problem, maybe you could include it your next post…
Cheers,
Jon