On Feb 3, 2005, at 4:01 PM, AZ Pete wrote:
> I have a somewhat theoretical question regarding VMWare and how well
> it isolates itself from the rest of the machine.
> I'll explain by way of example.
>
> I have a Windows XP box which is one of my main use machines. We
> sometimes have friends and relatives over and they like to use this
> machine to surf and play games,etc. Due to the fact the my nephew
> likes to run P2P apps (Kaza and the like), there's a very high likely
> hood that this machine will get infected with viruses, spyware, etc.
>
> If I load VMWare and create a separate XP session for my newphew to
> play around in, will this prevent the "main" XP installation from
> becoming infected should he download some nasties within his VM
> session.
>
> If this is the case, one could simply create a separate VM session for
> each person that would use the machine and never have to worry about
> the main OS session being affected. Is this how it works or am I
> oversimplifying?
Yes, it's definitely possible. And it's even better than you think.
VMWare has the capability of creating sessions that either 1) always
commit all changes to disk 2) ask if changes should be made or 3)
discard all changes. This last type of session is extremely handy if
you want a very controlled starting point. I used to use it a lot to
test buggy installers and the like... but then I had the great idea to
use it with my daughter.
Basically, the games installed on her WindowsXP box (Jumpstart, etc)
all had the tendency to completely screw up the system and cause locks
and hangs at an extremely regular basis. So I switched her system to
run Linux (SuSE) and installed Windows in a VMWare session. Then, I
installed all of the software that she wanted to run and then switched
the mode to 'always discard changes'. After that, she could do
whatever the heck she wanted and, more to the point, the games she was
running could mess around as much as they wanted for as long as she had
the session running. As soon as she shut it down, ALL changes to the
disk were restarted. Meaning that the very next time she started up
VMWare, it was right back to where she had started the first time.
Very slick.
I also toyed with the idea of setting up a bunch of VMWare sessions,
all dedicated to a different game. But I rejected that idea since that
would be overkill and besides, I didn't feel like installing Windows
that many times.
Now in our case, it all proved to be an ultimately fruitless exercise
since most of her games were practically unusable in VMWare and so I
had to switch her to a dual-boot system... but still, the concept was
great.
Kurt
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