I’m a big fan of virtualization and VMWare (or VirtualPC). VMWare has made a big move by releasing a free VMware Player. In addition to running VMs created by VMware Workstation etc, it also “supports Microsoft virtual machines and Symantec LiveState Recovery disk formats”. That’s so cool. Free VMs from Microsoft like Fabrikam should work just fine (though I haven’t tried it yet).
Now anyone cam play with RedHat linux or Ubuntu Linux without having to setup a dual-boot environment. There are alo Community Virtual Machines of OpenBSD and Fedora Core among others.
Here’s what I really like about it, though, coming from a training environment. A vmware image can be created and then distributed internally to provide a real training environment. Yes, remote access solutions are great, but they’re not always practical. A lot of the stuff I do require a connection to a SQL server or Exchange etc. How sweet is this?