Having found quite a few virtual machine technologies last week this week I went through the process of removing the unsuitable solutions. Most of the solutions are totally unsuitable for one main reason, they don’t have any support. They are all community projects with just some help files. One other reason is that the majority of them are for a specific purpose, ie. emulating a 486dx to run that old MS DOS game.

Only three were really suitable and of these I discounted one. It’s a new player to the vitual machines market, has no proven background that I know of or have heard of and there is no API. The initial project that I’m putting together doesn’t look to have much use for an API to start with, but later expansion would benifit a great deal from it.

This left 2 players, VMware and their workstation and server products, and Microsoft with Virtual PC/Server. Having read and watched a few documents/webcasts about each of the products, what could be produced and the end result could be quite specular. This presents a problem – it could also be quite complex. For this reason I have a meeting on Wednesday to sort out what we actually want to run inside the virtual machines. I hope this will provide some idea of what is actually wanted so that now that I know what each of the products can do I can start to match a serious of solutions.

I know it’s a bit backwards but on Friday I met with the project planning guy. The origianl intension for me was to learn how to use MS Project properly. But instead the end result was I learnt that before using project I have some other things that need sorting and some points to look at.

So the new plan is to use the available documents and fill in a project plan. I already have some of the main points that were discussed in the meeting and this will help, but there are some other points that need clarifying first.

Loads to do, and I still have to write up my research on a testing environment.