VMware Fusion 50% Discount Ends Sunday

FYI!

VMware Fusion, the virtualization product for the Mac, will be released soon. You can still pre-order VMware Fusion for a $39.99, a 50% savings off its suggested retail price. This promotion ends on Sunday at noon (Pacific time), so pre-order today!

What are the Virtues of Virtualization?

This site is dedicated to answering this question by listing and expanding on the many good points of virtualization. It doesn't matter if you're using this technology for server consolidation, testing and development or just for learning, we'll talk about it here.

The magic of nonpersistent drives in VMware

Who in their right mind would purposefully go and mess up a perfectly good fresh install of FireFox? I would. Franky, I am using it as an example just because I am sick of all the media hype that firefox is so much "safer" than IE. Call this a rant... maybe it is. I see a browser much like I see a gun. Browsers don't kill computers, people do. Anywho, what does this have to do with virtualization? Not much, really, unless you're talking about the magic of nonpersistent disks.

Screen shot follows:



A nonpersistent disk is a very handy tool in the world of unknowns where so many of us live. Basically, what it does is make changes to the disk between disks non-persistent. I know, never use the word you're defining in the defination. But, it is so simple a concept, I'm not going to spend the time looking for the words.

Here's how I use it: I have a virtual machine with Windows XP SP2 installed. Besides VMware tools and Windows updates, nothing else is installed. After I got it setup just like I like it (sans fluff), I shut it down and edited the VM's properties. Under the Disk's settings, I clicked the advanced button and checked "Independent" and then "Nonpersistent." Once the settings are applied, the VM is set in stone (until you change it back to a persistent disk again). Now I can install software, test stuff and if I mess up or don't like the results, just hit the reset button and start over. This is not as clean a solution as snapshots if you are trying to be scientific about testing or doing detailed development tasks, but for a quick and dirty sandbox, it's awesome.



I've gone in and fine tuned the VM after using it for a while. My main goal was to make it boot as fast as possible so that I could test things quickly. I found a nice little list of services to shut off on the web somewhere... If I can find it again, I'll post it here. I also defragged it before changing the disk to non-persistant. Every now and then, I'll make it persistent and apply Windows updates and then "re-freeze" it.

Be sure that if you do this for yourself, you turn off useless things such as automatic updates & system restore. Those will just slow things down. Oh, and feel free to just shut it down rather than waiting for a clean shutdown! The disk does not remember changes between reboots, so you can't hurt it!

Next up will be about VLANS and VMware Workstation/Server. And you thought that this stuff was cool before? Hold on to your pants.