Digitalquill

Having just posted a good write-up of Virtualbox I am having a strange problem with my Ubuntu Desktop. I decided to update it all, so ran the ‘apt-get update’ which was fine, but when I ran an ‘apt-get upgrade’ it decided it needed to download 150mb or updates. This was expected so I allowed to to go and get them, which was when the problems started.

The whole PC ground to a halt, task manager showed Virtualbox was using 100% of the CPU constantly.

I managed to get back onto the Virtualbox and cancel the upgrade which then released the CPU. However after repeating the upgrade the same thing happened.

Doing the same on the Virtual Debian works fine…

Very strange… Anyone else had any similar problems?

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.