Free Virtual Machine technology

Virtual Machine technology is one of the coolest things to hit the mainstream PC market. I won't go as far as saying it is "new", because the Mac had Virtual PC at least 1o or 15 years ago. Virtualization has been around even longer (anybody remember IBM VM?) But the availability of the technology and the commonplace knowledge of it is "new'. And, now it is free! Microsoft and VMWare are now racing to see who is going to be the top "virtual machine" company in the future (VMWare is by far better today!).

So, next time you need to test something, build a lab, or even combine a few low-usage application servers to a single machine, consider virtual machine technology. You will need LOTS of memory. At home, I run 5 to 8 simultaneous VMWare Server-based machines at home on a single computer with 4GB of RAM and they run okay. Here are you "free" choices:

VMWare Server
Microsoft Virtual PC 2004
Microsoft Virtual Server 2005

My personal preference is VMWare Server.