A Time Before Virtual Machines

Starting out as a system integrator in the mid-noughties was an interesting time.

The company I worked for had not yet adopted the idea of running virtual machines. I don’t believe it was due to a lack of innovation; my colleagues and leadership were among the brightest people I’ve ever met. Today they hold positions in various companies, which is a testament to that.

Personally, I think times were different; we had the ability to focus on sole vendors and the ability to have segregated teams. Our projects team could easily split into a PLC development-focused team and SCADA development-focused teams, allowing them to “format” their laptop and install the correct operating system and development environment. I say laptop, yet for the first 6 months, I operated off a desktop. I even remember performing commissioning duties on site and carrying my desktop,monitor and keyboard with me.

That said, I grew up in the service division. We engineered “small projects”; however, our primary role was rendering service and support to our SLA clients 24/7. For us, it was much trickier; we had to find ways to run a multitude of software and more than often simultaneously.

Here are the three painful ways we managed:

- We used cloned hard drives. We had a set of hard drives that we would cycle through, with boxes labeled HDDs all over the place.

- We used imaging software to restore our disks. Norton Ghost was the famous one; we would have a base operating system image always ready to be restored.

- Dual Boot. Yes, we would partition our hard drives and boot into different partitions.

Fast forward to 2008/2009. We finally got our hands on VMware Workstation, and the landscape changed. All of a sudden, we could run a multitude of software across a range of operating systems. With the discovery of virtualizing in 2010, I switched over from my conventional Microsoft-based laptop to the MacBook. Without some sort of virtualization, this would have never been possible. I’m on my second MacBook now, and I’ve never looked back.

I can keep my hard drives to a minimum and don’t use any tools for imaging software.

Here are some tools that you could use for running virtual environments:

- Parallels Tools: Link

- VMware: Link

- Microsoft HyperV: Link

- Oracle VirtualBox: Link

Hard disk space and Memory (RAM) will continue to be a problem with our incredibly hungry applications. I am glad, however, that the pain of reinstalling my laptop is over. Long live virtualization!