64bit and Virtualisation

I have two systems at my home which run on 64 bit AMD Athlon and until recently I had never considered them to be a great advantage over normal 32 bit systems. Indeed, they perform better in some tasks, but for my daily needs of web browsing, and some office tasks, I hardly take advantage of their true power.

Well, over the last week I have been toying with xvm VirtualBox by SUN. Just google it to know more, but in a nutshell, this little software allows you to run other Operating Systems inside another OS. So I have Win XP running on my Kubuntu based laptop, and Kubuntu inside my WinXP based laptop.
And I have to admit, things run flawlessly. The best part about the whole deal is the SUN provides this software free of cost (well, not completely, but one rarely bothers with the nuances of fine print) and open source (which of course is completely free).

Having experienced the power of being able to run two Operating systems on one machine got me thinking on the whole Vista (pun intended) of possibilities open to 64 bit users.
One major performance factor when running virtual machines is the amount of RAM you can dedicate to the VM. And a 32 bit system cannot go beyond 4GB (if my info is correct). So you would usually have to limit yourself to allowing 2 GB of RAM max to any one of your VMs. And running multiple VMs (why anyone would want to is an open question) is out of question.

Enter 64 bit processors. These can address 16 TB (TerraBytes) of RAM. Run a 3.2 Ghz Quad Core 64 bit system with 12 GB RAM, and you can run 4 independant VMs on the same machine. Why would the average joe need such a machine??? Simple. Home based virtual desktops.

I have a total of 3 systems at my home. 1 used by me. 1 by me Dad. 1 is pretty much offline for some time now. And them I have a couple of old prehistoric machines lying somewhere.
If I invested (whenever the time comes) on just one machine as described above, and use my old systems as thin cliens, I would have a top notch system my whole family could use independantly without interfering with each other.

So its evening time and my Dad has to complete his office work, Mom needs to check out a new recipe on the Net, I need to update my blog, we just use our pesonal systems, connect to the xvm Virtualbox and do our stuff.
And then sometime, I can have a recording session with my band. Each band member gets his own system to plugin to and we have a multi track live recording of our songs.

Point being, I forsee a future where none of my systems will be obsolete. And one powerful system takes care of all the needs.

Birthday!!!

My dad just (1.25 am) celebrated my BDay cos he couldnt be there on the 3rd. He's the sweetest dad ever. N mom is the sweetest mom ever :-D

Blogs!!!

Ok. Blogs have been a hell of a phenomenon on the web. I put up this blog when it was still a pretty new idea, but I had no idea that blogs would become a part of daily life on the Net. If you have a passion (music, computers, arts, movies etc), then there's a blog out there which pretty much details each and everything about it.

I have been pretty much ignoring my blog. And starting from tomorrow (or today) I shall be penning my thoughts to the public. And maybe sometime in the future, these blogs will become a legacy...

Here's to blogs... and the knowledge they behold for the future.