I'm installing Windows for a teaching lab that wants to have Windows software available. It's been an interesting experience. Using Windows is a really unpleasant experience: it constantly pesters you and gets in the way of trying to get work done. Ugh.
Using VMWare for virtualization seems pretty cool. I was more inclined to go with Virtualbox, but others wanted VMWare and the ability to run VMWare Fusion, with MacOS and Windows windows interspersed does seem cool. Both have parts of their virtual machine open sourced and other parts closed, so it's hard to make a determination on that level. We were able to get an academic license to use either for free, so the price difference didn't matter.
One important feature of VMWare for interacting with radmind is that you can have sparse filesystems that are split up into files that are not larger than 2GB. This suggests that we won't have to copy more than a few GB of data per machine each night to restore the image of Windows available in the lab. I was worried it would be a disk image the size of the full drive.
At startup, VMWare would ask whether the image had been copied or moved -- I found a post that suggested putting this line: uuid.action = "keep" into the vmx file would prevent it from asking the question. We'll see. I hate not being able to make dialog boxes go away -- its one of the things I hate about Windows.
One important trick I found for running in Unity mode: turn off the desktop background. By selecting "none" and the color black, when you move windows or close windows, the screen updates much faster and without jarring redraws of the a grassy field.
The first time I tried a virtual machine copied over using radmind, it looked like most stuff worked fine. I did notice an error associated with tpconnect (which appears to be something related to printing, but I'm not sure). I haven't tracked that down.
It's been time consuming to get this far, but I'm hoping we'll have a working Windows installation in the lab when students use it tomorrow morning. We can work on refining the details over time, although it stinks to not be able to do file-by-file improvements -- 2GB a pop is better than nothing, but it still sucks when compared to the file-by-file control we get with radmind.
- Steven D. Brewer's blog
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