Virtualization: Performance and practicality as a syncronization solution

Question

I basically want my laptop and desktop to be entirely synced to each other, I was wondering if it is possible to virtualize my laptop to have the same everything as my desktop. I don't know if this is even the best solution, especially since Ive always thought the reason to deploy virtualization was to have inexpensive and/or light hardware and I certainly do not.

Answer 1

I was wondering if it is possible to virtualize my laptop to have the same everything as my desktop.

When you make a virtual machine, you will have to install the virtualization software (e.g. Vmware Player) and create a VM. The VM definition consists of a number of files that define the hardware for the VM. At least one of these files will be the file that works as the virtual disk for the VM - and that's going to be large, e.g. if you want your VM to have a 250GB disk, then this file will be or eventually be 250GB in size.

All these files must be present for the VM to work, wherever you want to run it. So "synchronizing" your VM on different machines will involve moving all these files every time you want to run the VM on different hardware. You can try putting the VM files on a USB disk, but it will be slower than a native disk. Don't try this on an SD card or USB 2.0 flash drive - it'll be too slow.

With a USB 3.0 drive, especially a USB 3.0 SSD or eSATA external SSDs this might not be so bad, though. Make sure you have the same version of your virtualization software installed on every system you plan to move it to.

Note that video performance is not the best on many virtualization platforms, even though it's much better now due to IOMMU technology, so if you do heavy gaming, this probably won't work well for you.

especially since Ive always thought the reason to deploy virtualization was to have inexpensive and/or light hardware and I certainly do not.

Not really ... the main reasons for virtualization are lowering total hardware requirements by running multiple OSes on one physical system, and taking advantage of the snapshot feature of VMs - this lets you "rollback" a VM to a previous date/time easily.

Many companies have many servers running, but servers that don't fully utilize hardware, but still need to be in separate OSes (like license servers, etc.), so "combining" those servers onto one physical box via virtualization saves them money. Companies can by one or two large systems that run multiple OSes instead of one system per OS.

At home, especially if you are a gamer or make heavy use of your system, you may come close to fully utilizing your hardware, so this benefit of virtualization is not useful unless you want to run a second OS that doesn't require much of your hardware.