I have a close friend who is a network engineer that specializes in virtualization. We've have many talks over coffee and ice cream (only sometimes mixed together) about why the heck I would want to virtualize my computer.
Virtualization refers to the process of tricking your computer into thinking it’s two or more machines. Mostly it’s used on servers to make “separate” servers on a single physical machine box. What exactly the purpose is of this… I’m not sure. But it can have one very nice use for us multimedia people: Testing.
In print, you design your page, proof it and print it. If the press is working right and no one switches the plates, you get what you designed. You can take a look, smile and rest easy knowing that tomorrows paper will look just like you wanted it to.
Not so in digital media. As
I’ve mentioned before, things show up differently on different computers. A major component of this is your operating system and setup. Rather than but different computers to test Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Vista, Linux, Unix and all of the rest of the derivatives… Why not create a testing box with all of these environments? You can set up the machine with all of these options to test your new web product without buying a dozen computers.
Now, I’m not sure if this works across the Mac/PC barrier… You’ll have to talk to a virtualization firm for that. Use it or not, but if you plan extensive testing for multimedia products, consider virtualization.
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