Work and play setup

Work and play setup

If you are like me. Not only working in the IT sector but also loving IT (pun inteded), not necessarily loving all the bureaucracy involved but loving all of the testing and tinkering with new software, setting up your gear for play without compromising work can be challenging.

You would certainly like to test the new Software X, or Release Candidate Y from your favorite vendor, but it might compromise your ability to deliver promised deliverables to your customer on time. We all know customers do not like waiting don't we?



Recently I decided to setup my work laptop for both work and play. My requirements were quite limited.

• I have to have stable environment for work
• I need MS Office for work
• I need room for installing / testing new software
• I need Linux environments for both work (ServiceNow Discovery and Runbook) and play (MuleESB, Android development, misc)

After contemplating the issue for a while I came up with the following setup.

• Linux Mint 14 on the laptop
• VirtualBox installed on the Mint
• Windows 7 virtual machine with MS Office running on VirtualBox
• Any number of VirtualBox virtual machines
• All virtual machines have access to (some) shared folders on the Linux Mint

"Now why would you go with Mint 14?" I can almost hear the question. One simple reason: I have a guy at our office who knows a lot about it, so I don't have to google everything.

It took the whole weekend to set the system up, but most of the time was spent downloading and installing updates to Win7 and MS Office, so not a lot of actual work was needed.

After using this setup for slightly over a week I can say that I am happy with the results.

1. I have the Win7 image with MS Office I use for work
2. I always have a "clean" Win7 virtual machine waiting should the in use Win7 virtual machine get corrupted or become slow. I can be back at work in minutes and not days.
3. I have number of VirtualBox images with different Linux distros and different software I can test and toy around with.
4. I can use the virtual machines as targets for ServiceNow's Discovery and Runbook functionality without allowing the MID server to access sensitive data on the laptop and without additional hardware

Initially I had some issues with the laptop's battery. But after following some advice from the "guy at the office", the laptop's battery lasts about 120% longer.

PS: Oracle actually provides pre-built VirtualBox virtual machines with A LOT of installed oracle software HERE