VMWare
by Stephen on Mar.06, 2007, under Tech Tips
Been using VMWare a bit at work to test out a few Linux configurations, that would normally involve me reinstalling a machine and being unavailable until I’m back in windows.
Being able to create virtual servers to test things is just so useful, I don’t know how I got by without it.
At home I’ve tested VMware with my dual boot system, 1 drive is set aside for linux, so I can now boot into Windows and from there launch my linux system, I’m sure most people will say I should go the other way and launch windows from linux, but linux is there for playing and windows is for games, I suspect that my games wouldn’t run so well in a virtual server but I’ve not tested that yet.
From work I’m playing around withvarious Raid configurations which would involve me having multiple drives available so I can change their set-ups, using a VM I can just delete the drives and start again if anything goes wrong. This way I don’t lose anything off my computer and can reconfigure and reinstall as many times as I need to.
To put it simply something like VMware (Microsoft have a virtualPC, there’s Xen too, I’m sure theres more I don’t know of) is essential if you want to play with/test another operating system or computer setup without having to repartition drives and mess about setting up dual boot systems. And whats best is it just works 
March 8th, 2007 on 6:03 pm
And for us Mac users its also handy to have a copy of Parallels handy