VMs For the Masses
By Stephanos Gosling
With the release of its Workstation product line, VMware freed up a whole class of users who, because of their professions or computing requirements, were stuck in a dual boot nightmare. VMware was amazing technology: Unix administrators like me could run Windows in windows on their boxes; software developers could test their software on multiple platforms simultaneously on the same machine; and no-one compromised stability. GSX Server logically extends these concepts, but is focused on running multiple virtual machines on small- and mid-range servers.
Virtual machines have been around for a long time on mainframes and larger enterprise/Midframe architectures, and they're slowly coming to the smaller machines. The User-mode Linux Kernel project (user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net) leads the way in the open-source arena, but GSX Server is the first commercial product to let you employ multi-platform VMs on Windows NT/2000.
Much like the Workstation product line, GSX Server uses this virtual machine technology to mediate between the host and guest operating systems, controlling the resources that the guests see. This means that to the host, each virtual machine is merely a process. So for example, a guest can't crash the host even if it dies in the most hideous of fashions. GSX Server is split in the middle: the application's back end (the virtual server) and the portion that emulates the virtual machine's user interface (the console) are separated, both conceptually and as code.
