I have become a big time virtual machine user (Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 is my tool of choice), so as a result I am constantly starting up and shutting down various VM’s. I have found that a much faster way to both close and reopen a VM is to save the state and then resume from the saved state.

The ‘Save State’ function is essentially the same as the Windows hibernation function. Everything in memory is saved to the hard drive, so when you resume the contents are written back to memory and you are ready to go. Doing this is significantly faster than going through the start up and shutdown procedures and allows me to keep the applications I need on each VM open, so I am ready to go when the VM loads.

Making the switch from Microsoft Windows or Apple’s OS X to Linux can be a daunting proposition for most people. There are a lot of negative myths, half truths and misinformation out there that scare many people off. Fortunately there are several ways to experiment with, and get to know, Linux that will not change your system as it is now. Continued

At work, I run Vista Business as my primary OS and I use several virtual PC’s (my tool of choice is Microsoft Virtual PC 2007) with Windows XP loaded on them so I can test development projects and have the ability to maintain a common “alternate” environment. For obvious reasons, this is preferred over having a different physical machine or a separate boot for each environment.

One very handy trick I found is that you can copy virtual hard drives (.vhd) files and instantly get another environment. For example, you could build a new virtual PC hard drive and load XP with all the updates and then simply copy the VHD file to a new file name and, whola!, you now have two ready to go environments. All you have to do is just run through the virtual PC creation wizard and set it to use an existing hard drive (your copied VHD file) and you are ready to go.

If you have to deploy several environments quickly, this is a great trick to know.

If you want to run one OS from inside of another OS (a guest in a host), then a virtual machine (VM) is the way to go. The great thing about VM’s is anything you do in the guest has no effect on the host so it is ideal for testing. While there are many choices available for any OS you use, one choice to consider is VirtualBox. Vi

VirtualBox is an open source virtual machine software package which works on all major OS’s. There are many features which make VirtualBox attractive, such as mouse pointer integration in Windows and Linux (this is huge) and portable configuration files. VirtualBox is owned by Sun Microsystems, so this is a pretty good sign future development is in the works.

Personally, I use Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 for my work use, but the feature set of VirtualBox really has me considering giving it a try.