VirtualBox

VirtualBox is a really great piece of open source software that allows a user to install and use an operating system on top of another operating system in its own little sandbox. This basically allows the creating of multiple virtual computers on your one physical machine.

This facilitates a few different things.

1. Installing software on an experimental basis without messing up your primary install. 
2. Allows the "test driving" of a new Operating System without committing any of your data to it.
3. Snapshots and subsequent reloads from that snapshot that make backups a breeze!
4. Allows testing of software on different platforms easily, perfect for a developer with limited space.

Those are just the things that I have found use for it with, I am sure others would have other ideas. 

Running VirtualBox on my Windows 7 host with various Linux guests. No instances started yet.

For the purposes of the assignment, I downloaded the most recent version of VirtualBox (4.2.16 as of this writing). I installed it and then promptly downloaded Linux Mint and installed it virtually. I briefly cover my experiences with Linux Mint in another post found here on my blog. 

Linux Mint 15 running inside a virtual instance via VirtualBox. The window is capable of being resized or even displayed in full screen mode.

The best feature, in my opinion, of VirtualBox is that I don't notice it. It just works quietly in the background allowing me to use other operating systems with no risk. The guest Operating System runs quickly with no hesitation. VirtualBox uses system resources effectively and when I switch back to the  host system, putting the guest in the background, it experiences no slow down or lag.  I probably have slightly better system specs than most, but barely.  (Intel I5 2500K OC'ed to 3.6ghz, 8gb ram, 256gb SSD NVIDIA GTX430) As I said, nothing super impressive, but decent enough. I allocate 2 gb of ram to the guest system and 2 cores of the quad core processor, which seems to be plenty for this setup. I haven't used it for anything intensive yet, but I will be downloading Blender (open source 3d creation tool) and putting it through its paces with that.

I have used commercial virtualization software and it ran much the same, except VirtualBox actually ran faster than the commercial software, VMWare. VMWare does much the same thing, but for much more money. Much of the features are the same, snapshots, multiple VMs, system recovery, etc. They also offer additional features, but none that I care to use. There is absolutely no question for me, VirtualBox is the much better value. I haven't run across a scenario where the "personal cloud" features they tout are worth it. (Besides that being such a bastardization of what a "Cloud" is.)