Spencer: January 2009 Archives

This is an attempt at a how-to for getting a few servers up and running that can talk to each other as well as with your host desktop machine all with vitrtualization.  This has been a personal desire for some time and I have read documentation about how to do this and have tried multiple times, and every time it seems that the job is complex and error prone.  So this how-to will describe how I finally was able to get it working with almost no effort!  Yeah!

First of all, let's set the scene and give ourselves a goal:  We want to have a VM web server and a VM database server running on our desktop that runs a simple web application.  The two machines need to talk to each other.  And we want to be able to open our desktop web browser and access the web application running on these VMs.  And do all that without any complex configuration or breaking your desktop's network settings.

The first thing we will use in this setup is VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/)

For a long time I've suffered under the illusion that I was doing ok in managing my time and all that I was working on.  I assumed that all other programmers, software engineers, system administrators, etc. all had lives similar to mine and that we all barely keep our heads above water and at any moment we could drown.

Well the truth is different from that, and it took a book to help me understand that.  Please, please, please- if you are at all in the IT industry and work with code, or systems, or networks, or stuff like that- then please buy and read "Time Management for System Administrators" by Thomas A. Limonecelli (O'Reilley).  This book is not magic, don't get me wrong- but if you feel that being burried by tasks and projects is normal and that you have to work more hours a week than a "normal person" becuase your job is just that demanding- then you need this book to help you see differently!