Now there’s no excuse.  Honestly.  If you’re not using Virtual Machine technology, what’s holding you back?

First there was VMware, a robust and commercial virtual machine manager, creator, executor.  Very nice.  Very expensive, but with a free version.  Then along came Microsoft’s free VirtualPC.  Easier to use and set up.  Somewhere in there came Parallels, Mac only (until later, when they came out with a Windows version), and quite easy to use… but $80.  And then VirtualPC was available only for the higher-end versions of XP and Vista.  WTF?  And getting a license to run the free VMWare is like pulling taffy.

Along comes Sun’s VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/)… totally cross-platform (there are versions for Windows, OSX, Linux, and Solaris, and even has an SDK).  Totally free.  Easy to set up and use.  And extremely powerful.

Now, there is no excuse.

So what is a Virtual Machine and what would I use it for? you may be asking yourself.  Well, I’ll tell you.  A Virtual Machine is just that, a virtual computer.  It’s your computer emulating another computer, within itself.  And there’s really no limit to the number of computers you can have, all different, running different OSes, if you want.  Your real limit is memory.

Which is getting pretty cheap.  Most OSes will run in 1GB of memory (Vista is a pig in 1GB, but all the others are fine with it).  I recently purchased 4GB of RAM for my Mac Mini (never mind that they sent me DDR3 when I need DDR2, that’s another matter) for a paltry $63 on Amazon.  In 4GB of memory, I could run the primary OS and 3 virtual machines, each with 1GB of its own dedicated RAM.

And what would you use it for?  Well, anything you want.  For instance… I am partial to a few shareware programs as servers.  I use Abyss for a web server and FileZilla for an FTP server.  But let’s say I didn’t want to kludge up a Windows installation with these servers; I could create a VM (Virtual Machine), install Windows on it, and then install my servers on that.  Then if I want to shut down my “server,” all I have to do is shut down the VM; I don’t have to shut down the entire computer (you know, in case I want to keep using it).  As well, it is a piece of cake to take a “snapshot” of the VM to revert to later.  So, say someone finds an exploit in FileZilla and starts serving pr0n from my FTP site… I can just revert to a known-good snapshot of the server and boom!  No more virus.

Better yet, VMs can be frozen in place, so you don’t even have to boot them each time.  It’s similar to putting a computer in hibernate.

And backing up an entire computer, OS and all, is as easy as copying a few files.

Here’s some other great uses.  Want to try Windows 7 but don’t want to dedicate an entire computer to it?  VM.  Only have a Mac?  No problem; just create a VM and install Win7 into it (I did this very thing not long ago, since my only real portable computer is my Macbook Pro, but I needed a Windows installation to get to my company’s VPN).

Want to try Linux but don’t want to deal with dual-boot or dedicate an entire machine to it?  VM.  Don’t want to spend $400 for the Mac version of MSOffice, but you have a Windows version?  VM.

Got some dorky hardware that there’s no drivers for in Linux, but want to use Linux anyway?  VM!

And here’s my current favorite use.  I have many computers and one small room to keep them in.  Well, that room heats up, I can tell ya!  But I need OSX and I need a Windows machine and I need a server… I could put all of these into one computer, turn off the other actual machines, and save $$$ on air conditioning.

VMs can be tiny appliances as well… Astaro (http://www.astaro.com/) offers virtual machine versions of their security suites.  Many Linux and Unix distros are available as VMs.  There are tons available at http://www.vmware.com/appliances/.  And VirtualBox speaks VMware, BTW.

VirtualBox has some very clever other features as well.  For instance, the VM itself can serve as an RDP server.  This means that any VM is accessible via, for instance, Windows Remote Desktop.  Or VLC.  No more issues with not being able to access a certain machine remotely.  And pretty much every function of VirtualBox is accessible through commandline interfaces.  So even if you have a headless Linux box in a closet somewhere, you can set up VMs on it and run them from there.  Easy-peasy.

So what do you use VMs for?  Tell me in the comments below.