Virtual PC's (Off topic)

[Cobra7]

This post has nothing to do with Lansweeper.

Do any of you guys use Virtual PC's in your testing? I just got MS Virtual PC 2007 yesterday and figured out how to make an image and do my testing. However I noticed in some of my reading that some people go as far as to put Windows Server 2003 and 2008 on it and create entire virtual networks.

My main question is what is the point of that? What are the advantages of doing it? Also any links to some intresting Virtual PC sites would be nice, I'm trying to expand my experence to see how else I can use them.

[scpspjk]

In some cases virtualization is a great tool for testing. For example, we have gone through several domain upgrades and it was useful to create a DC in a VM, isolate it, and test the upgrade. It is also perfect for testing high-level app/service upgrades such as SQL, or IIS.

Also, at some sites, we have secondary DCs, and the only function is a quick recover in case of FSMO failure. (I sooooo dislike restoring AD from backup). In this case, the secondary DC is taking up 10GB hd space and 512MB RAM on a ESX35 sever at the site. Why waste hardware on this function?

I also have VMs of different desktop OSes to test how group policies play with Windows 2000, XP SP2, XP SP3, and Vista.

I hope this helps....

[novasam]

I have been following your posts, I'm new to lansweeper. I would have to second the last post the ESXi is the best place to start playing with Virtual Machines.

We have several ESX and ESXi host servers. We recently replaced over 50 physical servers with 4 ESX host servers, and our datacenter A/C is now able to keep up with the load. Also less electric to run the consolidated servers.

There are some cool things when you can cluster your ESX hosts, so that you can migrate VM's from Host server to host server so you can do maintenance on the hardware without ever turnng off the Virtual server. I have migrated 10 to 20 VM at a time and users never knew that I had to take a host down to replace a Quad NIC. This is one of the biggest advantages of VMs as they no longer depend on the hardware, and you can upgrade the hadware without the VM being effected.

[Hemoco]

If you have a spare server I suggest switching to vmware ESXi (it's free)
You can build a small network on one physical server with multiple virtual servers with only a little performance overhead.