Putting the Squeeze on Microsoft's Virtual PC

Tony Austin
Monday, 28 July 2008 15:50

Your IT - Home IT

There's little doubt that when most people today use the term "virtualization" they're referring to its use on commodity Wintel platforms. As a long-time industry observer, I've watched with a degree of amazement, how during the last four to five years, this term has risen to virtual obscurity (pun intended) to being on almost everybody's lips. It's almost as frequently mentioned at the moment as is the Apple iPhone -- drat it, I'm trying to studiously avoid mentioning that desirable device -- but the iPhone is ephemeral while virtualization in one form or another will be around for decades to come.

 

Since 1993, I've been doing a fair bit of work in the IBM Lotus Notes/Domino space. Originally, when developing and testing collaboration applications I used to have to set up three or four physical Windows machines and install Lotus Domino on each of them. But for the last couple of years I've instead been using Microsoft Virtual PC to perform exactly the same functional testing on a single desktop machine, which is far easier to set up and manage. (In case you're wondering, I have VMware too, but for no particular reason one way or the other so far haven't used it all that much even though it may be a technically superior product to Virtual PC.)

Meanwhile, lots of organizations have started using the virtualization approach for such things as server consolidation or to conserve data center space and power. All very good reasons, indeed.

PUTTING THE SQUEEZE ON VIRTUAL PC:
Now, down to the meat of this article. After the first couple of years of "virtualization euphoria" organizations have begun to realize that not everything in the virtualization garden is rosy, so to speak. These days, more and more people are having to worry about some of the negative aspects of virtualization, and there's now quite a lot of discussion about such things as "virtual server bloat" or the security shortfalls of improperly established and maintained virtual systems.

For me, when wearing my cap as a software designer/developer rather than being in a production data center environment, the only real concern has been that of virtual machine bloat. I found that it didn't take the setting up of all that many virtual Windows machines (with other software like IBM Lotus Notes and Domino loaded) before tens of gigabytes of hard disk space were chewed up.

If you were to repeat this many times over, as in a larger organization with hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines, you'd be talking about terabytes of hard disk space being consumed, which of course equates to a serious concern in anybody's language.

To resolve my own admittedly relatively small concerns, but indicative nevertheless of what could happen when scaled up, I looked around for any third-party offering that could reduce the amount disk space consumed under Microsoft Virtual PC.

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