Use a virtual machine -- it's free!

Phantasm66 said:
You create a virtual machine, which is like an actual real machine, complete with BIOS and everything, and then you install XP in that, yes.

So, you wind up with XP running on your machine, and XP running inside a virtual machine running on XP running on your machine. You can then surf with the VM XP, knowing that you can just discard this VM if it becomes compromised.

Its really quite secure, since to the VM, the host OS is just another machine on the network, it has a firewall, etc.

Not just for XP as a VM, though. You can run Linux inside a VM, have access to the command line, tools, etc, but still be able to surf the Net, use e-mail, games etc on your XP host OS.

Its the future.



You have to install XP in the VM as if it was onto a newly built machine ; you then have to install applications onto XP as normal, yes.

The only difference between the VM and a real machine is that the VM exists only as some files, and runs on any machine that has VMware installed.

Vmware is available in many flavours, some are free and it runs on Windows and Linux, and is coming to the Mac. VMs created on Vmware under Windows run on Vmware on Linux and vice versa.
Click to expand...

Would it be jsut as safe if you did it in reverse?

Say you use your main machine O.S. to browse dodgy sites, and then start up the virtual machine when accessing important websites.
 
No, that would most definitely not do.
If your main machine was infected, then your internet access, importatnt system files may all be affected. The virtual machine runs within the main machine, so it would not be wise to run it that way.

Regards,
Your friendly momok =)
 
Phantasm66 said:
VMware server is free to download and use. Just stick to that.

Its not CPU intensive (you know a lot of the time your CPU is doing very little in an OS) but it is RAM hungry, the more the better if you get into running VMs, especially several at once.
Click to expand...


I've got 512 ddr ram and my system already drags and cries for more. I am assuming a VR software would not be the best thing till i double my ram?
 
It depends solely on what OS with how much RAM you intend to run inside the VM.

If you want to run DOS, then dedicating some ~32MB of system RAM to that is not going to be a problem. (But your CPU will start to melt, since DOS does not have CPU idling functionality.)
If you intend to run two copies of Windows XP in that 512MB of RAM, then that will probably hurt a lot. You'd want to triple your RAM to make these beasts happy.
 
This May Ruin the Flow But......

Wouldn't Firefox, Macafee Site Advisor, and "NoScript" get you about 90% of the way to where you're going with this? I'm laboring under the assumption that this is reasonably sturdy porn site proofing. Be gentle with me, I'm only asking.
 
alot of anti-virus programs are using virtual machines to detect viruses before definitions have been created. The anti-virus program I know that uses that is Bitdefender. But as far as virtual machines, I think the idea is a create idea, why risk firewalls and anti-virus scans and updates when you can keep your machine completely safe knowing it cannot attack your system.
 
I'll probably try this on another computer to see how it is, I don't look at pr0n like you said but I do go on the internet and download stuff ( mostly demos of games and stuff )

Wouldn't Firefox, Macafee Site Advisor, and "NoScript" get you about 90% of the way to where you're going with this? I'm laboring under the assumption that this is reasonably sturdy porn site proofing. Be gentle with me, I'm only asking.
Click to expand...

Well... sortof, NoSCRIPT is what I use, it blocks every site from launching scripts like java and activeX unless I say so, Plus if you browse the internet with Firefox and some security knowledge you should be able to stay secured from most things
 
hynesy said:
alot of anti-virus programs are using virtual machines to detect viruses before definitions have been created. The anti-virus program I know that uses that is Bitdefender.
Click to expand...

They use limited virtualization and emulation/sandbox techniques. Not a full blown vm, can you imagine how long it would take (not to mention the bloat) if they used vmware or virtualpc for this for scanning of files... :)
 
new to pcs,

Hello To All, I Stumbled Across, This Site, I Find It Very Intresting. And Glad I Find This Site... Mtaylor5 Thanks
 
Would it be possible to keep in on a flash drive, get linux on the flash drive too, then I can VM anywhere? Which file should I install? the first one (~21mbs) or the second one (~146mb) on the website? Also, inside the ~21mb .zip file there are 4 .exes. Which one to install on flash drive if it is the first one?
 
ChrisLam said:
Would it be possible to keep in on a flash drive, get linux on the flash drive too, then I can VM anywhere? Which file should I install? the first one (~21mbs) or the second one (~146mb) on the website? Also, inside the ~21mb .zip file there are 4 .exes. Which one to install on flash drive if it is the first one?
Click to expand...

Can someone answer my question(s) please? Can the virtual PC from Microsoft be used on multiple computers if it is stored on a flash drive?
 
I think so, if you can make virtualpc 2007 store the virtual hard disk on your usb drive. You'd have to install virtualpc on the other computer all well though. I'm not totally sure it's possible, but I think it is.

Virtualbox is also a nice program
http://www.virtualbox.org

virtualbox is easy to learn As far as I know, it has more features than virtualpc 2007, but I'd recommend virtualpc 2007 to the beginner because it tends to be easy to configure (I had virtualbox configured within 1 minute though, really easy :p)
and since more people know it, I guess it would be easier for you to solve problems you might encounter
 
Is it against Microsoft's licensing policies to have the same copy of Windows XP installed on the guest machine and the host machine?
 
OK, i see the advantages of using this software for the home users. But how would it benefit a large organisation.

VMware states that it is used by the top 100 companies.

For example, If a large company was to have a physical server PC and inside that, 10 virtual PCs running as servers, how would this benifit them? I understand that they are easy to maintain. But at the end of the day its still one piece of hardware doing all the work.

If it is used for a client PC then only one person can sit at a workstation at a time. So it must be used as a server.

I ask becasue companies are using it, so it must have benifits and i am just interested.
 
Uhm.. You are missing so much information that I don't know where to start! (Not all of the following applies to the "consumer" programs discussed in this thread).

OK, first.. Who says that you have to run virtualised PCs or workstations? You can virtualise servers too!

The beauty of virtualisation is efficiency. If you have 10 PCs or 10 dedicated servers, then most likely they are using some 10% of their CPU capacity and maybe 20% of the disk space and power requirements. So, a single server can easily run 8 virtualised PCs/servers and you can hook it up to a decent storage solution that lets you dynamically manage disk space. Instead of 90% or 80% waste/overhead, you can have 20% "just in case".
Not to mention the space efficiency. You can shove 10 blade servers in 5U that can run 50 virtual servers. Quite an improvement over 50 1U (or, the horror, 2U) servers consuming enormous amounts of power (and generating the equivalent heat). Of course, there are workloads that require dedicated servers and will consume all the available resources, but majority of the servers in most setups are extremely underutilised.

Redundancy. You can have clustered virtualisation. N amount servers running X amount of virtual machines. In case of a server failure, all VMs on that are restarted on another. In case of planned downtime, you just migrate the VMs away from the server, shutdown, do your stuff and move the VMs back. In case any of the VMs demands more resources, the others are moved away from that physical server to give more resources to the hog.

Backup. You can take point-in-time snapshots of all your VMs to undo any software changes.

Automation. Want to shut down half of your servers at a given date or time? It's 10 mouse clicks away instead of configuring lights-out on 50 servers separately.

Etc etc etc etc.. I really can't think of all the cool stuff here :)
 
WOW, I see. Thats awesome.

Lets say a company has 10 PCs or servers, running at 20%. Why not just get rid of 5 servers and run 5 at 40%....or get rid of 7 and run 3 at 60%...

Or is there so much one computer can process at a time and having many (virtual) PC's in a PC allows it to process more. If that makes sense.

I don't really know much about IT, i'm more into business. So maybe the above statement is crazy to you, and the answer is obvious.

Thanks for giving your time, much appreciated.
 
Well, with PCs it is obvious.. It's pretty tricky to make users share a PC :)

As for servers.. Yes, you could lump several services into one box even without virtualisation, but that brings a lot of reliability, security, stability and compatibility issues. Imagine a Windows server that runs 10 different business-critical services. Patch Tuesday comes and all your services go down at reboot. Compare to 10 virtual servers that you can reboot one by one, interrupting only one service at a time.
 
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