Last weekend, my brother finally showed me VMWare. I had heard about it some time ago, but never had the time to actually try this out. After downloading evaluated one of the pre-built virtual machines, using the VMPlayer I decided to download the Workstation edition to go and create some virtual machines myself. So another 80 MB download to go.

Fortunately that’s not so much compared to a Debian install. Everything’s running pretty smoothly. I decided to finally put Oracle on my laptop again, but this time in a Debian virtual machine. I wish I had checked out the requirements for Oracle first, coz’ after I unpacked the distro, it said Debian isn’t supported. Probably there’s a way around it, but I guess I won’t bother and just start the download for one of the supported versions.

VMWare though is a great solution that allows me to continue to improve quality measures for several of the things I’m doing. I’m looking into expanding some of the test suites we run for products such as the Spring Framework and other open source frameworks. Until now, I didn’t have the option to run different versions of databases on one machine and now I have VMWare, I can just install Oracle 9i and 10g on one machine (in two different virtual machines).

Although there is a pretty large amount of setup work to do (I still need to install the new build server for example that I got before I left for a holiday late last year) but I guess this will improve our quality measures even more.

– update: I just noticed somebody blogging about the VMware Player. Here’s a link.