This post was contributed by Nate Solloway, a new guest blogger to our team. Nate has been supporting the infrastructure needs of Community IT Innovators (CITI) clients since 1998. Community IT Innovators (CITI) is an employee-owned company committed to helping social mission organizations effectively use technology. Nate wrote about how CITI went virtual in a previous guest post here.

It's time to admit I have a problem. I keep telling myself I can quit any time I want. I can't look at a software product without thinking "I bet I should virtualize that."

My habit started innocuously enough. Microsoft sent me a sample of a product called Microsoft Virtual PC. Virtual PC is an example of desktop virtualization, in which you can run different operating systems on older computers in your computer system. That means that people who need to work on, say, an old-but-still-useful database or other legacy application wouldn't have to give them up. I found that Virtual PC does much more than that, though.

On my XP laptop I installed a virtual instance of Windows 98 and was suddenly able to play some of old favorite role-playing games (RPG's) that never developed support for Microsoft NT architecture. Maybe it was being lost in the imaginary game world of Baldur's Gate, but I began to see possibilities for using virtualization at the desktop level.

When I go into small organizations and have to take their domain controller offline (the part of the server software that controls logging in, checking permissions, etc.), I have a ready-made one on my laptop ready to join to the domain so the desktop computers can authenicate to the virtual instance all day while maintenance is performed. This saves considerable maintenance time.

Suddenly I was carrying testing configurations of everything I needed to troubleshoot. Windows systems with various versions of Outlook, Linux desktops for testing network compatibility, and doing network scanning. With virtualization, my laptop became simultaneously a sandbox for learning and a toolbox for administering networks.

One organization I support had a challenge of doing Arabic and Hebrew HTML newsletters. Getting proper right-to-left formatting was difficult without international versions of Windows XP installed. Those versions had problems with some of the other software we used, so I put Virtual PC at each desk and people could run the international version of XP for specialized tasks.

Virtualization is a buzzword now, but there was a time when virtualizing servers was new and scary. Desktop virtualization is an easy way to become familiar with the basics of the technology before starting to virtualize your servers. There are two free products available that make this an easy start. If you have installation disks for Windows XP, you can be up and running in minutes.

Virtualbox is the desktop favorite in our office. It's free, rugged, and works across Windows, Mac, and Linux. It's lacking a little on the networking tricks side, but for a non-Windows user who needs that one Windows-only program to run in a window, it's a nice choice.

Microsoft Virtual PC is also a free download. I often use it to acclimate people to the idea of virtualization. The interface is very Microsoft-style, so long term Windows users are not intimidated by it. Unfortunately, it is not cross-platform, so not handy for a non-Windows shop that needs some Windows licenses to run some software.

In my next blog post and I'll be using Virtualbox to walk through an installation and explain some of the vocabulary you run might into.