VM Workstation

Having now used my virtual workstation for many months, I can provide a meaningful update about the whole thing.

For those who want some background I wrote about what I'd like to achieve a while back. I ended up running VMware Fusion on a 17" MacBook Pro.

First of all, it works. I use my main virtual workstation all day every day. Deployment was as simple as creating a disk image of my ThinkPad, putting it on my MacBook drive and pointing VMware at it.

My only beef are three persistent bugs with VMware Fusion:

1. Sometimes the keyboard doesn't work when I resume my workstation image. A keypress results in a beep. The only work-around is to go from full-screen to single window with Command-Option-Return and then maximizing the window to full-screen again. This is a PITA since my Gnome Toolbars then "helpfully" move around and don't get put back where they were.
2. When I wake the workstation, sometimes for no particular reason the network is off and I need to re-enable it.
3. I've stopped sleeping my MacBook with VMware running because there is a nasty bug that somehow causes VMware to freeze which results in data-loss - very unhappy. So now I quit Fusion, and then sleep my MacBook. Not ideal.

Things that work.

1. I have the ability now to snapshot my workstation, or development server, or client image, or whatever and do an upgrade or driver install and then roll it back with no pain.
2. I am running this with 3 external monitors and it just works. I'm using the DVI port and 2 x USB-DVI adapters with 3 x 1080p screens (Toshiba PA3768) - which also rotate - niiice.
3. I'm using Afloat to keep a VM window floating above my "normal" desktop, so I can use Ubuntu as my workstation full-screen while still keeping an eye on another VM.
4. My backups are using Time Machine on a sparse bundle drive, which VMware doesn't notice. So all my VM images are stored on this drive and Time Machine just backs up the sparse-bundle file.
5. I pulled out all the apps from OS X and created an OS X guest machine where I can run iTunes etc. Sound is still buggy on this guest, but I'm working on that.

All in all, this has proven to be a little nerve racking in the early days, especially with the data-loss issue, but my productivity has increased no-end and I can say that this is a vast improvement on running my workstation on bare-metal for many many reasons.

Now if I had a few more hours in the day I could get back to doing more productive stuff for the Ubuntu Server Team.

Workstation Virtualisation

I'm a long-time software developer. I have a ThinkPad R52 from August 2005, the last of the IBM's. I'm in need of new hardware. Since upgrading from Ubuntu 7.10 I've been unable to properly virtualize anything (VMware went away). I want to keep running Ubuntu but am fed up with fixing hardware issues. A suggestion made to me was to buy a PowerBook Pro and virtualize my desktop.

The idea is to run a stock standard OS X PowerBook and then run my normal Ubuntu Desktop as a virtual machine. Since I'm also writing software and testing all manner of strange configurations, I can then also simply virtualize all the other things, such as Ubuntu Server installations, various pre-release versions of Ubuntu, specific client configurations, etc.

Most articles I read talk about running Windows on OS X, and I'm really not interested in that - other than to export my accounting data out of MYOB.

My personal experience of VirtualBox under Ubuntu is less than stellar. A virtual machine that crashes *ever* is not an example of a tool that I want to run in production. That's akin to a hardware failure and a cause for the return of said hardware.

I need to be able to run this workstation with an external monitor, have a full monitor view of my workstation, run other tools on the other monitor. There will be times that I expect to run my virtual machine across both monitors.

I expect that the OS X side of things takes care of wired and wireless networking, battery management, sound and bluetooth connectivity, but I don't want to run OS X applications, other than the virtualization tool of my choice. I might even launch terminal once or twice :)

Am I opening up a whole can of worms trying this, or are there people who have gone down this path and come out the other end with a better understanding of what is what?

I should note that there was an initial suggestion that I run Ubuntu natively on the PowerBook hardware, but then I'm back to where I started, dealing with crappy hardware issues, video drivers, wifi chip-sets, sleep and battery issues, screen resolution, dvd drives, etc.

I'm not interested in migrating to OS X, I have more than enough work just keeping abreast of what is happening within Ubuntu and Ubuntu-server.

While my CPU demands are not going to be significant - I don't compile much, I'm also not going to be running a high-volume web-server or a database. I cannot stand editors that take 30 seconds to load or many minutes to search for files, so there is an expectation that disk i/o is snappy and that I'm going to be able to stay with the same virtualisation tool for some time.

The actual tools I use on a daily basis are:
Thunderbird, Firefox, Eclipse, bzr, svn, cvs, mysql, apache, ssh, grep, find

Things I expect to work are:
sound, networking, dvd burner, external usb devices

Any comments, suggestions, recommended reading materials or hardware that I can trial this on?