Virtually Virtual
Posted on January 22, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized
The advent of the Internet has ushered in nothing less than a golden age for the small business. At what other time could a sole proprietor enjoy a global customer reach from the comfort of his laptop or convenience of his kitchen table? Thanks to virtualization - both of technology and of personal service - the extending power of individual talent and company experience has never been greater.
Virtualization: a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computing resources from the way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with those resources.
Virtualization is a technology term that refers to abstraction. Usually, it’s the abstraction of control mechanisms from the system that those mechanisms control; once they are treated as separate animals, the end user no longer has to know how the mechanism “really” works. Once the user masters the control interface, they have mastered the mechanism - and any other mechanism wedded to that same control interface.
That last part is what makes virtualization such a powerful concept. Around the world today, software companies are busy figuring out new ways of virtualizing your technology experiences. Run any operating system on your computer that you want, all at once. Play your PS3 on your computer, or run your home stereo through your toaster. With virtual machine technology, the lines between your individual devices and techologys blur until, ultimately, they’re essentially all one device.
A myriad of inexpensive, powerful virtual machine technologies are available to you today, many of them offering big advantages to your business. I use several in my day-to-day work and find them indispensible. I think you will as well.
1. vmWare. This nifty program, available for Windows, Mac and Linux, creates a complete electronic Intel-based computer in your current machine’s software space, allowing you to concurrently run any Intel-based operating system and software on a foreign operating system. Run Mac on Linux. Linux on Mac. Either on Windows, and Windows on either. Each operating system hosts excellent software programs not available for the other two - but with vmWare, you can run anything you want without a reboot.
2. WINE. I run Linux on most of my work machines; for me, this program is a godsend. WINE (short for Wine Is Not An Emulator) is a virtualized reimplementation of the Windows 32-bit API on UNIX architectures, allowing many everyday Windows programs to run seamlessly on the much more stable Linux platform. It’s not perfect, but it runs Microsoft Office and Half Life 2 almost flawlessly. Considering the cost (free), you can’t beat that.
3. TightVNC. Sometimes emulators and reimplementations aren’t enough - you need the real thing. But you still want the convenience of running everything on a single desktop. Enter TightVNC. Run the server program on a host machine and the viewer on your desktop of choice; a window simply comes up on your desktop, containing a replica of the host desktop. Take complete control of the host machine remotely, and run an office full of di
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