In a previous How To, we discussed how to set up the Virtual PC console in order to use a Virtual Machine. Virtual Machines allow businesses to set up test environments, a sandbox, in which an application or even a network will not interfere with the production environment. Indeed the virtual machine can be used along side a production environment and real live applications will not be affected.
For this How To, we will add a Sql Server 2005 virtual machine that was downloaded from Microsoft.
Virtual Machine Technology is like having a computer inside a computer. It allows you to work with applications, create networks, write code in the .NET environment, trouble shoot applications, all in a sandbox environment. Here the virtual machine and its operations are kept separate from the core-host machine. If the virtual machine blows up, the host machine is unphased.
Virtual Machine technology allows businesses to have multiple servers on one main server. Suppose a company needed to have a mail-exchange server, a database server running Oracle, and another running Sql server 2005, another server running financial software and one or two servers running manufacturing and engineering software. This could get very expensive. The company would have to purchase the hardware and the software. But by having a virtual machine environment, instead of having to purchase 4 or 5 computer-servers, each costing between 7 and 10 thousand dollars, a company only needs to buy one. That server would be loaded up with RAM and Multi-Core processors to handle the operations of several different virtual machines. Indeed the server may well cost upwards of 15,000 dollars. Still this would be a lot less than spending 40 to 60 thousand dollars on hardware. Now, the company only needs to buy one server, and the software to run on each virtual machine.
This is the way of the future and Windows 7 offers an opportunity to do this.
Once you have Windows 7 in place, Download the Virtual PC 2007 Progarm from Microsoft. Read the rest of this entry »