While migrating from MKSTools to Cygwin to VMWare-plus-Knoppix over the years, I’ve recently ended up with VirtualBox-plus-Ubuntu as my preferred way to run *nix-depenedent builds/tests on my Windows systems at home.
Reducing cost is one a factor. A bigger factor is the ease of finding documentation, FAQs and HOW-TOs. VirtualBox and Ubuntu just seem easier to use, too. Another factor is power use.
With Solar PV cells soon to be offsetting a small percentage of the electricity I use at home for servers, consolidating multiple virtual servers on fewer physical systems with larger memory reduces power use by a large percentage.
The kill-a-watt shows that my home server systems consume around 2 Amps each, so instead of running four at once it would be better to consolidate the work on to one system, saving 75% or 6 Amps. (I use Solaris Zones on my lab systems at work to also conserve power, space, and cooling requirements).
Category: virtualbox
posted by Mike Wright on: September 11, 2008