Dmitri on Virtualization

Virtual appliance idea is lovely.

You are a .NET developer, starting a small software project. It comes along, and you feel it is time for source control. You want to use Subversion because friends say it is cool and fancy. But installing and configuring subversion is a mess and a pain. You are reluctant, if you never did it. And intimidated, if you have already tried.

The answer is Virtual Appliances. Look how lovely:

I download a virtual appliance with subversion installed and preconfigured. Power up a Virtual machine; with couple of touches my subversion server is up and running. No mess on my laptop. No dusty ubuntu box in the corner. No installing Apache, no configuring subversion. All is prepared and packaged professionally. I bring up the VM when you need it, and where you need it. In the morning, check out, in the evening, check in. The rest of the day it can sleep as a file on my pocket USB hard drive. As the team grows we will run it 24/7 on the network server. Sounds ideal for a small mobile team.

Reality check.

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Why would you ever wants to install Virtual Server inside a VM? R&D or Demo Lab. My use case is building a portable lab for testdriving System Center Virtual Machine Manager Beta 2 on laptop with WinXP.  Ideally, I would have a single fully functional VM with all VMM components, that manages the Virtual Server on the host laptop. But VMM agent doesn’t install on XP.  So I attempted to install Virtual Server on the Virtual Server VM running Win2k3.

Is it possible? Short answer is NO.  Virtua Server intalls on VM no problem, but fails to start: “Virtual Server encountered an unexpected error, 0×00000003.”. Let’s have some fun and install Virtual Server on VMWare! What now? Pretty much the same, only the error message is obscure: “Virtual Server encountered an unexpected error, 0×00000003.” No luck

Is this NO final? Never say never. People thought it wasn’t possible to install EsX inside a VM until VMWare Workstation 6.0. But someone knowledgeble shared with me that it was all possible well before, with secret tricks well kept in VMWare. There might be a trick kept in Microsoft. Or you might know, then please leave a comment!

Simple. I do think virtualization is a next software frontier. I am playing with it. Here I host my scrapbook to keep the notes. Here I post my thoughts and ideas to share with other virtualization enthusiasts. Drop by.