Near-Native Virtualization Solutions for Linux -- VMware vs. Parallels
Jesse Stanley
The miracle of near-native virtualization technologies has saved professionals countless hours of OS thrashing. Excluding 3D graphics, systems administrators can accomplish nearly any task requiring a multitude of platforms within the comfort of the Linux workstation. As computer software abstracts the ones and zeros of bits and bytes into our user experiences, virtualization abstracts the operating system experience into a more dynamically usable context-independent tool. Thanks to the hard work of two virtualization technology companies, the world of virtualization has increasingly become more powerful, more transparent to the user, and more accessible.
Motivation and Use Cases
Who uses virtualization and what do they use it for? Virtualization is so empowering that it is difficult to imagine all of the potential use cases for the technology. For engineers, virtualization provides access to client/server and cross-platform development in a single workstation. Client/server development is trivialized by the accessibility of running your Windows client within a window, or for some by isolating the server container within a resource-limited virtual machine, allowing full access to the computational power of the workstation. For software quality assurance teams, virtualization offers the ability to switch operating system contexts with minimal effort, to instantiate an operating system at any stage of its life cycle, to take a snapshot of a use case, and to replicate that application ad infinitum. For systems administrators, virtualization enables multi-platform staging grounds for OS patch testing, agile server reconfiguration, sandboxes, containers for legacy applications, and self-contained extremely accessible technical assistance and training to end users.
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