I’ve been reading a bit over the last couple days about virtualization solutions for servers, specifically VMWare’s Server product. These sort of solutions allow you to run multiple “virtual” machines on one actual physical server, which in some cases means you can take better advantage of under-utilized machines while at the same time creating completely seperate environments (even running different operating systems) that will not conflict with each other.

What strikes me in reading over the VMWare blogs is that the people who seem to be having the most success with the server, in terms of consolidating from 10 machines to 1, or whatever, are those who have large Windows Server installations. They have taken to heart the idea of “one application per server,” which is pretty much what it sounds like — each major application, be it your accounting system, your virus scanner, your mail server, whatever, sits on its own server, completely seperate from everything else. This helps keep things secure and stable, but the trade-off is that you have to get a *lot* of servers, many of which are generally underutilized. Replacing them all with one powerful box and VMWare makes a lot of sense in that case.

In our case, however, we have several machines that *are* well-utilized, and so the propsect of virtualizing, say, a heavily loaded web server or an important database server does not really appeal to me. Thus the inflated performance numbers you might find in the Windows world are somewhat dulled in the Linux world where, I think, its a bit more common to have a few or several different services running per machine, in a fairly secure and stable fashion (or, in the case of our web server, running things in “jails” so that they can’t talk to each other, a much more lightweight form of virtualization that is fairly effective in certain instances).

Still, I’m intrigued, and I’d like to investigate this further, but I don’t really have any machines to spare right now on this sort of thing. It doesn’t help that I can’t find much in the way of peoples experiences with VMWare Server in Linux or UNIX environments, not to mention the complete lack of published benchmarks. I’ll keep looking, and if anyone has any suggestions, do pass them along.

Now that I finally have Virtue Desktops working correctly, I can say that my new new new computer is finally perfect, at least for the time being. This is the third new computer I’ve had the pleasure (?) of owning in the past month, and after I got it I had to wait another week before the RAM and hard drive upgrades arrived. I received the new hard drive yesterday and, thanks to the number of times I’ve now done this, was able to go from virgin platter to reasonably usable system in about an hour and a half. This morning I copied over all of my music and documents and such and finished configuring a few additional programs, and now I finally have a rockin’ setup again. Yay!

But but but, this is a *MacBook*, and the last time we checked in, you had a *MacBook Pro*! What happened? Read on…

Continue reading “Compy 3”

Recently I made the somewhat unprecedented move of consolidating everything I do onto one computer — my late-2003 15″ PowerBook G4. I was getting tired of things going out of sync, of having to switch between various computers to find what I needed, of having my music in one place and my photos in another and absolutely nothing on my work computer. I’ll talk about my thoughts on consolidation, and some of the cool new utilities I’m now using, at a later time. Right now, I’m thinking about an unintended side effect of the move, which is my complete loss of confidence in Mac OS X.

In short, some of the more fatal flaws of OS X have been masked to me up until now because by jumping between various Mac and Linux computers, I would never leave applications open on the Mac for long periods of time and wouldn’t necessarily use the Mac for some activities. Now I’m running a bunch of different programs all the time on several virtual desktop screens, and the amount of instability I’m experiencing is quite unacceptable. Programs are *constantly* crashing — and these are Apple programs, not third party ones — and occasionally my entire machine becomes unresponsive for brief periods or, when resuming from sleep, just doesn’t even come back up for at least thirty seconds.

Rui Carmo over at The Tao of Mac really nails it with his article Is Mac OS X Becoming Crufty?, which covers most of the issues I’ve been having with Tiger. What I most love about the Mac is how everything is so nicely integrated into a good UI with global features that make me more productive. My chat client and my mail client tie into my address book. All of my passwords for everything are stored securely in my Keychain. Spotlight search lets me find anything anywhere. But in order to get a lot of this integration, or simply because there are no viable market alternatives (as they have been driven out of business by Apple), one must use the Apple-provided apps. iPhoto, which used to stop working after you added more than a few hundred photos, has at last received a much-needed update that causes it to suck less. But Safari gets angry when you have too many windows open and starts behaving strangely. Apple Mail is just an abomination, and Spotlight’s search behavior, not to mention its UI, leaves a lot to be desired.

Paul has been leaning on me heavily to ditch the Mac platform with all of its flaws and move over to Linux full time, as that platform (and Ubuntu in particular), is really starting to reach some sort of desktop maturity, finally. On the one hand I really don’t want to leave behind some of the great apps and utilities I use on the Mac, and I really want the slick integration of everything that I theoretically get on the Mac. On the other hand, if I can get a cute little laptop with twice the battery life and twice the power at half the price, and run Ubuntu on it, and have a rock-solid experience, even if its not quite as shiny, maybe there is something to be said for that. My first computer was a Macintosh II. I’ve been a loyal Mac user for *years*. But I’m worried I might be reaching the end of my rope, and it might be time for a change.

Thoughts? Advice? Similar experiences?

When much of your life revolves around computers, its complicated to keep everything straight. I have a computer at home with a big screen, a computer at work with two big screens, and a laptop that travels around with me. Two of the machines are Mac, one is Linux. All three have important functions. But keeping them all in sync is a nightmare — bookmarks, preferences, passwords, documents, music libraries, calendars…everything drifts apart.