I’ve been dabbling with virtualization for a little while now. My brief history is that I started using it officially when sitting my first MCP exam, and used Microsoft Virtual PC in my class. Then, when I got my new laptop, I decided the ‘modern’ thing to do would be to take a virtual image (using VMWare Converter) of my old laptop, and run it on my new laptop if I later discovered I needed a file or something.

Last weekend I was introduced to hard disk corruption of the worst kind (that I personally have ever seen) and Vista just wouldn’t start. To cut a long story short, after 4 days of fighting to get it working, as I prepared to reinstall the operating system it just started…without complaint! Ever since then I’ve had no troubles (touch wood!) but it got me thinking as to how bad I am for a personal disaster recovery. If my laptop was to go down I’d have a little backup of my most important files, but the things I would lose and miss the most would be my program settings, and having to go through all that again! Thus I had a brainwave, and after much research I have discovered the best solution for my problem.

I have installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my laptop, and installed VMWare workstation for Linux on there. Now, my machines (so far just my Vista machine) are virtualized on it in nice virtual files. I just run them, and I’m up and running in my normal environment. I take a backup of that file, and I can restore my machine very easily, onto any physical computer with great ease! I’m getting with the times and the technology behind this is simply amazing!

So far there’s been no major issues (again, touch wood!) and I look forward to completely changing over to virtual machines.

If anyone has any tips on using virtual machines as your primary machines, or needs advice on installing VMWare Workstation on Ubuntu, leave your comments.