My laptop (the one I don’t want customs inspectors to be poking around on) runs Windows 7 (just upgraded from Vista). However, on it I also run a replica of my main Linux server, in a virtual machine.
After the upgrade, VMware Server, which wasn’t playing very nicely under Windows Vista either, started to give me serious trouble. The VM was due for an upgrade anyway, as its virtual hard drive was much too small. So I decided to… well, before upgrading the VM, I decided to check if there is perhaps a better option than VMware.
I first tried the obvious: Microsoft’s Virtual PC, which is a standard add-on to Windows 7 Ultimate. Nope… it didn’t play nicely at all, not with a Linux VM. So what else is out there? This is how I happened upon Sun’s VirtualBox, a (mostly) open source virtual machine solution.
I installed VirtualBox on a 64-bit Windows 7 test machine. Worked fine! Then I installed a complete Slackware 13.0 setup. Still good. I then did a full backup of my server to this VM. This also worked, though there was a minor snag: in the morning after the backup, I noticed that the host OS was completely locked up and needed a hard reset. Was it related to VirtualBox? Perhaps.
I then transferred the VM to another 64-bit Windows 7 machine and there, too, it worked well. So now it was time to move it to my 32-bit Windows 7 laptop. As Murphy’s Law dictates, that’s where I had the most trouble. For some reason (leftover nastiness after the VMware uninstall?) VirtualBox only sees network interfaces if it is run as Administrator. I also needed to enable multiprocessor support in the VM in order to eliminate a nasty (especially on a laptop!) problem of the VM consuming too much CPU, even when idle. Oh yes, and there was a crash, too.
Right now, all seems to be well though, and the VM works reliably, much better in fact than VMware. So maybe I have found the right solution. I’ll find out soon, when I’ll be doing a little bit of travel with this laptop in my suitcase.