LinuxQuestions.org - DISCUSSION: VMware 5

Glad to see someone is taking this virtualization stuff seriously early on. I have been touting it as the biggest thing to be soon revolutionizing IT , for at least the last year and a half.....and now, for those who have been paying attention [doesn't hurt if you have current information practically from the horse's mouth either] ,Microsoft [behemoth company with name suggesting need for Viagara] and Intel along with key player VMWare have been less silent about where the longer view may be taking things. It doesn't take too many psychedelic mental windows to start seeing where creative types will make profitable use of virtualization technology - apart from some fairly common use in assisting with development of software in corporate settings, how about some of the other possibilities.....not that these are all everyone's cuppas, but imagine how many tv channels you can have going simultaneously, or internet cafes, or classrooms.....how many actual boxes? Well 2 PCs with 2500Mb or 3 gigs of ram could easily accomodate 6-8 guest OS's, - using something like
ATI's hydravision, 10 monitors out of one box could accomodate half to a third of a class of kids,, at enormous hardware savings. I've run up to 5 virtual machines with 2 gigs of ram and generally they are damn fast with 256 mb of ram allocated per vm. They are now, thanks to VMWare Player [which is free] portable, yes you can take your computer on a disk and pop it into a friend's pc for example, so long as they have the free player installed [and leave their machine unperturbed]. There's little end of interesting ways which Virtual machines will make computing easier, and likely a lot safer for everyone. You can basically trash a virtual machine and it would be about as dire as a Matrix Agent needing to replicate on the rebound [with vmware you can clone them and store the clones independent of or dependent upon the original. What I REALLY want to know is what is true regarding some claims I've heard made re: impact of viruses in these virtual environments. Despite having been told by a friend who did robotics at MIT and is big into security that they can run wild in these things and not do much if any damage [provided they don't get out, maybe, like in a Mac where u were using Office]....I still want to see what happens. If anyone is knowledgeable about this topic of virii in virtual machines, through experience, research, and /or reliable information, I'd be glad to learn more about it. In the end, will it make any sense at all to keep running Windows on hardware as a host OS or only OS when it can be run inside a shell impervious to Windows viruses, in a virtual environment which may also offer further protection from malware?

Maybe there has been discussion on this board around these questions/issues but I am very new here and learning the lay of the land.

cheers
I