Posts tagged windows

Due to an untimely wipe of my partition table information from my 1TB hard drive on my desktop. I find myself once again questioning the OS I use on my desktop, my archiving capabilities, and the portability of my setup.

With all this in mind I have set down some concepts below; It will certainly be interesting to see if I keep to them, which fall by the wayside, when and why?

I am looking to run my desktop PC which is powerful; AMD 6 core CPU and 16GB of RAM as multiple machines.

This is not something new exactly, as I have been running multiple virtual machines on my desktop for years (that is why I have 16 Gig of RAM) the subtle difference is my desktop will comprise of multiple machines.

Goal is to remove and thin down the Host as much as possible.

Portable Apps should be used where possible and synced to network drive and be available for all windows desktops for use.

An attempt will be made to keep the disk drive image size down to below 64GB (e.g 63GB) , as these size flash drives are becoming cost effective it would be useful to be able to take any desktop environment with me.

I will be making an effort to try and use ubuntu when both OS provide the same application. I will see how this goes with MS Office as I cannot have files corrupted for work.

A word about the Host PC and the Guests:

I will have a slimmed down Host running win7 X64. it should take care of the following.

1. Adaptive tools which are graphic or hardware restrictive such as Zoom Text and Outbook (to cope with my visual impairment).
2. Graphic intensive applications (do I use any?)
3. VMWare workstation
4. Drivers for the hardware
5. Obscure applications that will not function in a VM Guest, these should be listed so a check can be made to see if ways around the issue is available later.

The DRP VM Guests initially identified:

• ubuntu x64 Desktop
• Win 7 x64 Desktop (Browsing, Work etc)
• Win 7 x64 Desktop Programming
• BMT (portable “Blind Man Tools” guest synced to flash drive)
• Other Specialist desktops as required

The first question that hits me is “Should each machine have its own network identity?” or “Should i use a VMWare bridge network adaptor or NAT?”.

I think the initial answer is I can see more issues with using a single identity, so they will all have separate ones; leading on from that decision it would make sense that a virtual machine can be seen at the network level as a separate entitiy so they will all have bridged interfaces. Ok,

I think its time to start…. I will let you know how it goes!