TAKE IT VIRTUAL

Alex Cox Jonni Bidwell

Strap on the goggles and enter a world where even hardware goes soft.

Running an operating system on real hardware is so passé. All those hours ensuring your hardware is set up and behaving correctly? Pah. Then so many more hours installing and configuring all the software, so everything’s just right, while risking what’s on the machine already? Ugh.

It can seem like an awful lot of effort just to, say, try out a Linux distribution, or create a clean Windows install. And, what’s worse, it can present you with a whole lot of extra work if something goes wrong. Killing your day-to-day Windows installation, that one you’ve spent so long lovingly streamlining and customising, the one you need for work, play and everything else? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

If you’re running a mission-critical system, you also need to figure out a backup strategy, because mistakes and hardware failure both happen. In fact, if you’re serious about these things, you’ll really want to have something that’s as close as possible to a mirror image of that machine, ready to spring into action at the first hint of failure. Even if you’re lucky enough to have an identical machine, maintaining such a thing — updates, drivers, software and all — is monumentally tricky.

Contrast this with a virtual machine (VM). With a VM, you don’t have to worry about setting up hardware — any hypervisor worth its salt translates whatever machine it’s running on into virtual hardware that your OS can easily understand.

You still have to set up the software side of things, but once done, you can replicate the machine at the press of a button, keeping a safe, clean copy for when you need it. You can test out changes by taking a snapshot of the machine and doing your changes there. If the copied VM survives, its parent will, too, as they’re identical. However you use your PC, the chances are there’s something to be gained from virtualisation.