I’ve got a small fleet of corporate laptops.
Due to proprietary applications, we’ve got an interest in dual-booting the machines. [Vintage applications used for programming alarm panels & the like.]
Some of our apps won’t play nice on the same machine [having several apps that install SQL server, for instance, gets real messy], along with other concerns.
If faced with a situation like this, what solution would the most cost-effective?
We’ve got a removable DVR/CDRW drive on this device as well as USB ports.
I’m wondering if plugging in a hard drive in place of the DVD/CDRW drive would be sane, or if it would make more sense to boot from a USB memory stick or USB hard drive enclosure.
Any DoperSysadmins with experience want to tell me which direction would be the smartest here?
Do you want more than one of the messy SQL-installing applications to run at the same time? More than one of the legacy apps? What OSes are they running on?
I’m wondering if virtual machines might be the way to go, especially for apps that only need the equivalent of MS-DOS. That way, each app would get its own playpen; you could create a master VM image with everything installed and configured for a particular app, and just copy it to the users’ machines.
I was going to suggest using virtual machines as well (which I always come out of lurking just to do).
You can even keep the virtual machine files on an external drive, allowing you to run the vm on any machine you want to, at any time, just by plugging in the external drive.
We could use either W2K or XP for this, actually.
We’d been envisioning booting from a drive with nothing on it but a copy of Windows XP and a copy of the XYZ Alarm vendor’s All-Star Alarm Programming and Haberdashery Management program loaded.
The regular hard drive on these laptops is encrypted, so in our above scenario there’s no risk of XYZ’s application running along, finding the SQL instance placed on our laptop by ABC Alarm Vendor’s Screamer Programmer 5000 app and then deciding to munge its tables or the like.
I appreciate the suggestion that we use virtual machine solutions for this. My boss actually had that idea, but we have apps that insist on using the serial port to control the embedded hardware we service. I’m afraid we have to run on the bare iron to handle that, although I wish I was wrong.
Run on the bare iron? How do you get past the hardware abstraction later in 2000/XP? A custom driver?
We had an app at my work that directly controlled the floppy-drive hardware to write non-standard formats, and as soon as we left the Win95/98/ME family behind, the app was useless.
I thought you could map the virtual serial port to the real port on the host machine, anyway, at least with vmware (the Server version of which is free, by the way). Although I’ve never done any programming against it, so maybe that’s not good enough, I don’t know.