Intel's intro of virtualization hardware for PCs should herald new era

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My PC has enough trouble with one copy of Windows running

Ahh, virtual PCs and servers. The new brass ring of computing. Maybe you would get less BSODs (http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/index.php?p=2135) if you didn't overwhelm your computer with garbage software and goofy virtualization schemes.

As you already state in your article ("Without any hardware assistance the likes of which VT provides, it takes far more in the way of physical resources (processor, memory) to launch and run virtual machines than it does if those instantiations can be activated through hardware."), the current state of virtual machines is not ideal.

Indeed, I would hazard a guess that it is about as expensive to have a second PC sitting next to the first one with a KVM switch than to supply one PC with enough system resources to do the same thing given the current state of software-based PC virtualization, assuming that one of the PCs is peripheral stripped (a simple CD-ROM drive in one, for example).

Here's where virtualization may save money:

* Software licsenses, if the software is licensed per physical machine as opposed to installed copy.
* Expensive add-on hardware such as pricey sound cards or video cards will tip the balance.

Will hardware based virtualization help? Maybe. assuming that there is zero system resource entropy or usage needed by the virtualization system, it is still a heck of a lot cheaper to get two low-end AMD or Intel chips and 256 or 512 MB RAM (more than enough for the needs of most people) than one CPU that is twice as powerful and twice as much RAM, and enough extra drive space to hold the second (or third, fouth, whatever) OS. Also don't forget that both OS's are going to be grabbing onto the hard drive at the same time. Since hitting swap file will kill you at this point, you'd better more than double the RAM, because while a machine with 256 MB RAM occassionally hitting swap is slow, imagine what happens when two copies of an OS both try hitting swap on the same hard drive simultaneously because you divided 512 MB RAM in half.

This is also why I am not making a big song and dance over Mac OSX on Intel hardware (http://techrepublic.com.com/5254-6257-0.html?forumID=99&threadID=184332&messageID=1881821&id=2926438), because as far as I'm concerned, you still only want to have one OS running at a time on each piece of software.

The only place where I see virtualization working out well is if you need two totally separate OS's running, and one of them is significantly less resource intensive. For example, you have a Windows 2003 server, but you want to have a rarely used (a few hundred visitors a day, let's say) B/S/LAMP server for your companies website, maybe running qmail as well. This setup works more than adequetely on a AMD Duron 750 with 128 MB RAM (that's what my BAMP server runs, and it barely hits 5% CPU usage), and therefore wouldn't cut into your Windows server too hard. Even in that situation, I'd want to put B/S/LAMP onto a separate hard drive, at the very least. Anything outside of that, like running 2, 3 copies of Windows XP and I say that you're asking for a headache.

J.Ja

Posted by: Justin James   Posted on: 11/14/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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