Virtualization

[wyverary]

My first experience of vitalization was in 2006. Out of all the products I tried, I liked Vmware Workstation the most. A few years ago I setup ESXi and having 3 VM runnning.

Virtualbox is a good product. It have improved a lot over the years.

VirtualBox has indeed improved, and I've learned my way around it a little bit more recently. I've loaded IPfire in VirtualBox on my OS X partition and am sorta kinda tinkering but I'm still not very good with firewalls (I'm studying for Security+ this term but we haven't gotten to playing around with "actual" firewalls yet beyond a little tinkering in a load balancer). For some reason I'm having a lot of trouble getting VB to properly save virtual switch configurations, so either it's a bug or I'm doing something horribly wrong.

 

[dragonwolf]

Neither pass my quality bar though, because even though I have a MacBook, I have wanted to be able to run a virtual OSX instance due to having some commercial software I invested in that was bought for OSX, and of course neither of these programs are able to do that reliably.
VirtualBox just won't set up at all; vmware would set up, but the cursor would respond with at a huge noticeably lag, and then both of the times I had successfully installed the images broke soon thereafter. Go figure.

To be fair, that might not be the VM software's issue, but rather an issue with Mac OS. Mac OS is locked down pretty hard, and you have to be very careful in the settings and hardware for a "Hackentosh." If it can be virtualized at all (I think it can, but I'm not sure), you'll likely have to set up the machine in a very specific way in order to get it to cooperate.

Basically, I've become obsessed. I have a Macbook Pro running Virtualbox, and I almost can't help myself in installing ISOs of various Linux distros, as well as Windows 7, 8, and 10 (I have free access to this stuff thanks to my school account), and plan on trying out some server software as well. The only problem I've come across that I can't fix is with Fedora, which does not seem to play well with VB or its guest additions. (Any ideas on how to fix that, btw?) I'm trying to learn my way through as many OSes as possible.

(And I made the mistake of putting 8.1 into Boot Camp. Bad decision, that was.)

So I guess...I've always loved tinkering, and this is just an extension of that. Does anyone else enjoy this sort of thing?

I do, though it's more on a practical level. As a web developer, I've fallen in love with Vagrant, which runs headless virtual machines (using any one of several of the providers) for lightweight web servers. It's great for tinkering with Linux servers and devops tools. It also saves having to run the support stuff (a SQL server, web server, etc) in my host environment, where it doesn't need to be running all the time.

It's also great for trying out OSes without destroying your host setup, or allowing you to work in your preferred environment, while having tools available that are only in the other environment (I've done this both with a Windows host and Linux guest and with a Linux host and Windows guest). There are days where I'll have my Vagrant box running, plus a Windows VM running for meetings that require tools best used on Windows. I also did it originally for trying out Arch Linux, which requires you to set everything up yourself (great for learning, but not something you'd want to dive head-first into by blowing away your existing install).

 

[The Penguin]

I've fallen in love with Vagran

You might got me interested. I'm on their website right now and seems like a interesting product.

 

[The Penguin]

I finished watching three YouTube videos, each from different people showing a demo of Vagrant. It is a very useful product and understand why dragonwolf told about it for this post. I'm going to create a new posts later today on Vagrant and the YouTube videos demos I watched.