Will virtualization help me?

[radderfire]

Hi All

Before looking in to virtualization technology further, can someone answer:

- Is Windows update straightforward when running an OS in a virtual machine?

- I'm interested in virtualization for business continuity reasons. If my machine stops working for any reason, I would rather this was in a virtual machine. One of the risks for me is Windows update. So, do you think it's a good idea to do no Windows Update in my real OS, and then just do Windows Update in the virtual machine run OS? Any issues you see there?

- If a virtual machine OS develops a problem, is it easier to fix than a standard OS?

- Does a virtual machine run much slower than a normal machine?

All comments welcome.

Thanks and rgds

Radderfire

 

[teaboy5]

Depends how big your system is.

We where look at one in our place and a nice sized one was costing us 50k including a SAN storage solution.

But we wont be getting it any time soon, because its not in the budget

 

[mdjmcnally]

Windows Update on a properly configured Virtual OS is the same as if running direct on hardware. No difference, you can even hook upto a WSUS server if you want too.

It is just as hard to recover if an Update fouls up the virtual machine unless you plan properly.

ie take a snapshot of the virtual image so that you can revert if the update breaks something.

I guess it is marginally easier though then taking a system image with Norton Ghost and then reverting from that.

If worried about Windows Update then why not stick a non-Windows OS as the base and then VMWare on top just running Windows in the VMWare environment. Its really not that hard to get a Linux distro up and running with VMWare Server or Workstation providing your virtual environment for Windows.

From my experience a Virtual Environment doesn't feel as fast as the raw box, however it depends upon the spec of the box and what the virtualization software can use. ie VMWare Server only use 2 Cores so if looking to run VMWare on Quad Core and one Virtual Windows then could be slower.