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Having recently taken delivery of a spangly-new 8Gb USB stick (20 quid including P&P from picstop), I was wondering what to put on it. Idly poking around my disk drive for large files I could potentially offload, I noticed that I'd created an Ubuntu VM for messing about with under VMWare Fusion.
"I wonder if it'll work off my stick?", I asked myself (or words to that effect). A few minutes and a confirmation popup click later ("Have you copied or moved your VM?"), I was booting into Ubuntu. Sure, it wasn't speedy, but it worked.
This gave me another idea: "I wonder if it'll work with a full 64-bit OS?"
Now, there are many 64-bit operating systems out there, but I wanted to be perverse, so I finally settled on the clone of "a Large North American Linux Company"'s distribution, the 64-bit version of CentOS 5.1.
It took me a few goes to get it right, but the trick is to remember to select the 'split drives into two gigabyte files' option when you create the initial VM -- if you don't, then you have to reformat the stick drive with a non-FAT based structure, which limits you if you want portability -- whilst Windows, Linux and OS X are perfectly happy with large files for the most part, only FAT works with all of them 'out of the box'.
Configuration was fairly straightforward, but I was only able to successfully get the VMWare tools installed and set up from the command line, using the tar.gz version. I think this was mostly down to the configuration part not starting automatically from the rpm install, but I got there in the end.
The last trick I wanted to try was moving my new CentOS on a Stick about. So I tried it on my iMac running downstairs; needless to say, it worked perfectly. The final challenge was running the 64 bit OS under 32-bit Windows -- would it work?
Well, what do you know? It seems to work just fine!
In fact, I'm writing this entry in CentOS running under VMWare Player, running under a vanilla Windows XP.
Okay, it's not going to win any awards for speed, but it works and that is quite amazing enough in of itself... And whilst it's cliche, my last trick will probably be to run VMWare Fusion under OS X to run my Windows XP bootcamp partition, to run VMWare Player and access my 64-bit CentOS USB drive installation.
I mean, I'll need to fiddle with memory configuration and stuff like that before there's any possibility it might work (and it'll be even less speedy due to the USB stick's connetion will have to be passed back into Windows via the VMWare USB bridge...
Ha. Well I've got to try it now... I just might be some time... ;-)
Unfortunately not, as you need vmware to read the disk images. You'd probably be better off with a live CD than a memory stick in this case...
Also, you get the killjoy message, "You are not allowed to power on a virtual machine within a virtual machine" when you try to do same. Talk about my party being pooped. Oh well!