Following my recent re-install of my desktop machine I have followed the direction we are heading at work and setup Virtualbox with several environments each with a different OS.
The Desktop PC I am running is relatively old, Pentium 4 1.8Ghz with 3Gb of RAM.
I have the following running in Virtualbox
- Windows XP
- Windows Vista Ultimate
- Windows 7 Beta (more of that later)
- Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop
- Ubuntu 8.10 Server
- Debian 4
- Debian 4 with ISPConfig Installed (again more of that later)
- Ubuntu Studio.
I have been trying to get Mac OSX working, which apparently is possible, but as yet I have had no luck.
I want to get Windows 2003 Server up and running as this will then replicate my windows server.
The main idea behind this is so that I have have environments that I can test things in before implementing on my live servers. I have been playing with ISPConfig on a virtual environment to see if there is any mileage with utilizing it. It looks promising.
The main advantage of virtualisation is that firstly you are in an enclosed, non-live environment thus no real harm can be done, and secondly if a mistake is made you can roll back to a saved point in time. It also allows me to save a copy of a basic Ubuntu or Debian setup and quickly create environments from it, meaning that testing things like ISPConfig can be done easily.
In addition to testing software, I have environments setup that are exactly the same as my live web servers, each with a copy of any websites deployed on them, allowing me to check any changes work on the most critical sites before releasing them to the live server.
I would like to be able to ‘mirror’ at least my Linux server to a virtual environment, probably on a day-by-day basis using the rsync’d archive backup.
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