Virtualization and why you want it

Many of you are probably familiar with one particular operating system, but desire to dabble into something else. Perhaps you would like to run and/or tweak with linux distributions; perhaps you already run linux, or a mac, but also have a desire for windows to be installed. In any case, what ultimately holds us back from installing another operating system often comes down to a few simple things.

First, there’s partitioning. Sectioning off an entire chunk off your hard drive is both scary (for the first timers) and creates less total space then would otherwise be available to either OS.

Second, neither OS can (generally) access the files of the other. Your photos, music, movies, homework, and detailed schematics of jello-powered war robots remain on the original partition, inaccessible to the new operating system.

Third, rebooting is annoying.

So whats is this virtualization software option? Simply put, virtualization allows you to run multiple operating systems simultaneously; each within their own window.

How is this done? A virtualization program works by creating virtual environments for additional guest operating systems. These “virtual machines” are digital representations of virtual (i.e. not real) computer hardware, which the guest is made to “think” it’s running on. In reality this virtual hardware is merely a thin abstraction which hides the guest from the real hardware and drivers, which the main operating system still maintains full control over. Additionally, a file represents a virtual hard drive, which dynamically expands or contracts as data is added to or removed from it.

An important thing to remember in this situation is that hardware is not being emulated; the virtual machine uses real computer hardware natively, just in a masked fashion. This is a non-resource intensive approach and produces very little overhead; the only real limitations to running multiple operating systems in this manner are the memory and processing footprints required to run them.

With virtualization, you can run multiple operating systems at the same time, right alongside one another. No rebooting, no partitioning, no boot loaders. Generic virtualized hardware means you won’t deal with driver issues. A useful feature allows users to select shared folders on the primary hard disk, which can then be used natively by a guest OS, which provides file interoperability. Newer features also allow for the use of SMP (symmetric multiprocessing), 64-bit processing, and even limited (though quite useful) hardware graphics acceleration.

There are several choices as far as virtualization software goes; some of which are quite reputable. I personally recommend Sun’s virtualbox; it packs the same features as the other heavyweights; while being open source and entirely free. I’ve been using it for a good part of a year now, and it performs outstandingly.

Regardless of your choice, virtualization can eliminate whatever issues you might have with running multiple operating systems, and make doing so a great experience.

Cheers