Virtual Machines (VMs)

I have used virtual machines a lot during my studies as the course often requires it, as it's often better to break things in a virtual lab environment than on a production machine.

I try to tinker with what I learned at home as well. Also a good opportunity to self-learn and play with some of the enterprise features.

Microsoft is really friendly with their evaluation versions. Windows Server variations are 180 days. Windows 8.1 Enterprise is 90 days. That's a very decent amount of time to play with and you can network your VMs together to simulate a network.

Mac OS X is free so you can bring that into your virtual network too if you like.

I also added some fun to my VMs by calling them different anime inspired names:

• YAMATO: is my Windows Server 2012 domain controller
  
• Shimakaze: OS X 10.10 workstation
  
• Tailblue: Windows 8.1 Enterprise workstation
  

And my Active Directory domain is called TOKYO.CITY

How about you? Do you use virtual machines? If so what do you use it for?

I used Windows Server 2012 for a college class in a VM. The VM itself was actually command line, and no one knew what they were doing, not even the teacher. I was one of the only ones to pretty much complete the assignment given to us, as there were so many things just breaking on so many different computers; like error messages that only occurred on certain computers.

I did consider using a VM to test my linux distros out, but I would much rather try the live edition instead as I get the full CPU and RAM.

I've never used VMs at all, but on my iMac, there's a featured called 'Boot Camp' that lets you install both the Mac and Windows platforms on it, something which has very often been misconceived as a VM, when it lacks the limitation a VM will have, especially the latency that comes with VMs.

I used Windows Server 2012 for a college class in a VM. The VM itself was actually command line, and no one knew what they were doing, not even the teacher.

Out of curiosity, was that a Windows Server deployment without the GUI? i.e. PowerShell only? If so that's pretty hardcore. You have my respect if you're proficient without a GUI.

I've never used VMs at all, but on my iMac, there's a featured called 'Boot Camp' that lets you install both the Mac and Windows platforms on it,

Boot Camp works quite well, Apple has decent Boot Camp drivers that Windows recognises nicely. And I would definitely recommend it over a VM if you wanted to game on your Mac or use Windows much more than OS X. From memory the Boot Camp drivers also lets you access your Mac volumes if you need to grab a file from your OS X volume - which normally wouldn't be possible without the Boot Camp drivers.

Out of curiosity, was that a Windows Server deployment without the GUI? i.e. PowerShell only? If so that's pretty hardcore. You have my respect if you're proficient without a GUI.

Yeah, pretty much the whole thing was without a GUI. I do remember now that we ran a copy of Win8 that had a dated version of VirtualBox. Everything beyond that point was command line. Now that I think about it a bit more, I think we were actually running a linux server. I guess two years later I just thought it was Windows Server as the only GUI we had was the Windows part.

From memory the Boot Camp drivers also lets you access your Mac volumes if you need to grab a file from your OS X volume - which normally wouldn't be possible without the Boot Camp drivers.

Actually, on your Windows platform in Boot Camp, while you can access the files in the OS X side of things, you can't 'grab' them per se. You can't copy or delete them in any way whatsoever. There's only a 'read-only' permission given unless you reboot the computer into your OS X platform.

@Orius - I stand corrected.

I got too used to the drag and drop functionality that VMware lets you do from your host machine to the VM window (and vice versa). You have to install a software package on the VM though to make it work, but after that it's super convenient.

@Orius - I stand corrected.

 

I got too used to the drag and drop functionality that VMware lets you do from your host machine to the VM window (and vice versa). You have to install a software package on the VM though to make it work, but after that it's super convenient.

I never try that before but VMware products work great even the free version.

Also work great with old PC games on Windows 2000.

I use virtual machines for various reasons. I have Ubuntu, so I can check what a website looks like on Linux or if I need to utilize something that I can get done quicker with a Unix CLI (e.g. creating and extracting tar archives).

Debian is my go to when I need a dev server, and I have a macOS VM because I need multiple versions of iTunes and I have a drive that Windows 10 will not read.

While it's not something I commonly do, I have made use of virtual machines for various older versions of Windows, as well as MacOS. For the most part it's something I do on rare occasion when I get an itch for revisiting some sort of particularly ancient and obscure bit of software from my past - not for anything particularly serious or productive... or when I feel simply like tinkering for the sake of tinkering, in the case that I end up captured by a flight of fancy.

I use VM's at work, but also I have VMware on my Macbook Pro. I have it pretty beefed up, so I don't have much latency issue on the VM. I mostly use it for the few Windows programs I like using that's not available on OSX. Also I really hate getting shared folders to work on Linux distros.