Virtual Machines

A Virtual Machine (VM) is an emulated computer, running on a physical machine. You take a few gigabytes of disk space, several hundred megabytes of memory, and install the operating system. Since the VM consists of several large files, it is easy to backup, restore, and copy.

Microsoft and EMC are leading providers of commercial software in this area (other non-commercial software is also available. Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 is free, and is allows you to create a VM on your computer onto which you can install a copy of the C-Cure 800 server for development and testing. EMC offers a free VMware Player which can run a VM created by the commercial VMware product or Microsoft Virtual PC.

Both vendors have higher-end offerings that allow the VM to be run in a production environment, and provide management and control tools. EMC is the industry leader with an extensive VMware Server product line. By running your security system on a VM, you can use server hardware more efficiently, and gain reliability and flexibility. Many companies have already moved to a VM environment for their database and webserver.

Hints/suggestions

• To get started, download Virtual PC 2004 from the above link. A PC with a P4 processor, 10GB free disk space, and 1GB of should be sufficient to load a VM.
• When you create the VM, you need to size the disk and memory. I usually assign 3-5 GB of space and 256B of memory. Adjust this depending on what will be loaded on the VM.
• After creating the VM, you must load an operating system. For Windows, an old copy of Windows 2000 is good because it does not require activation. For XP, you will need to activate you copy after the trial period. Linux and other OS's are also supported.
• C-Cure uses a USB dongle for licensing. Software House can provide a temporary "zero sentinel" license to Integrators that does not require the dongle.
• Digi offers products which allow a USB device to be connected to a hub on network (you need to verify compatibility).