Unix has always had a special place in my heart. I may have mentioned this before so forgive me if I'm repetitive. Back in the good old dos days SCO ran an effective ad with the line Instant Mainframe. The ad pictured a 386 sitting on a table in a glassed in room. The machine had twenty or more wires running from the back, presumable out to terminals or PC's. Now this was significant because in the early eighties mainframes were THE conputer and IBM was THE COMPUTER COMPANY and the IT department ran almost everthing.
The problem was that individuals and departments often had to depend on the IT department to provide them with information and reports. This IT dependent system was slow and lacked the agility that competitive businesses and managers needed. Consequently individuals and departments started buying PC's and generatiing their own reports and mini IS systems. Eventually the needs of the mini IS system began to grow beyound the ability of single user DOS and mini networks were started. As I recall, the major choices then were Novell, Banyon, and Unix. Novell quickly became the defacto standard.
In the late eighites I was asked to review a client's IT infrastructure and make recommendations to improve it's efficiency. They were running an NCR mini that used the ITX operating system. This was real serious stuff. And seriously expensive. An upgrade of their then 8 user system would have cost in excess of $100,00 inculding hardware and software. This is the context within which the SCO Instant Mainframe ad came to mind. To make a long story short, I was able to recommend and implement a 25 user SCO Unix system with hardware, software and cabling for less than $80,000. And to top it off the Unix operating system proved to be not only elegant in design, but rock solid stable. In eight years the only downtime that system experienced was due to a dead scsi drive. To me that was impressive.
In the late nineties I was called upon to perform a similar review for another client. They were running a a PICK application on a 32 user ATT system V box with some really old hardware. In addition they had a linux boxes used for backups. After a lengthly review of their operation and discussions with their staff and key software vendor it was decided to install a microsoft solution. The plan called for two NT 4 servers, one to act as the domain controller offering file and pronter services, the other, a large multiprocessor HP box would house their PICK based application. The linux box stayed in place. We eventuall got the NT boxes to run fairly well, although it was never smooth. The PDC just plain sucked. Morning logins were slow and reboots were regular. In fact we fond that reboots on at least a weekly basis reduced the amount of stress we suffered. The experience left me with a bad taste in my mouth for MS server products because in the final analysis the two NT boxes were not as stable as Unix nor were they performing as well as Unix.
Meanwhile my unix clients have been very happy and not experiencing problems at all. Like the linux box at client # 2 - they just keep running and running. In fact during the four years that I was associated with client # 2 the linux box never required a reboot. So you see my view of the two products really is from a position of experience - some of which I would rather not go through again. Since the NT4 I have had ocassion to install and support half a dozen or so Windows Server 2000 and 2003 sites. Server 2000 is a vast improvement over NT4 and 2003 is even better than 2000. But so far neither match the power and elegance of Unix ( now linux).
VmWare Server is the BOMB. Check this out. Take a serious dual or quad 64 bit processor and load it up with 8 gig of ram. Get yourself a big drive and some network storage. Install xp in a partition. Install Vista in another partion. Now the vista boot loader will let you choose vista or xp. Kinda cool. Except the MS way of life is fraught with dangers, adware, viruses etc. Now for the smooooth. Download a modern 64 bit version of Linux - I chose Ubuntu because of it's broad based support. Install Ubuntu and give yourself a large home partition. Reboot and the grub loader will let you log into ubuntu or if you choose the windows option you will be presented with the vista boot loader. Even Cooler.
Now boot into ubuntu and download/install the vmware server. After settimg it up you can install practically any operating system inside your linux OS. This is really cool. So lets say you want to learn linux fedora core. Just download it and install it in your vmware server gizmo and off you go. This is way to cool. So cool in fact that I almost never boot into xp or vista. The possibilities with linux and vmware are seemingly endless. So I installed an xp virtual machine in vmware. It works fine. It seemed a little slower than bare metal xp but then I added the vmtools and it sped up considerably. So I have my Visual Studio in there plugging along. Then I put a fedora core virtual machine together along with the lamp stack and it ran swell as well. In fact I can run both the fedora and xp virtual machines at the same time.
Now that things are set up I plan to install small business server in a virtual machine and see what it's about.