Virtualization as a Strategy for Maintaining Future Access to Multimedia Content

Virtualization and emulation techniques are getting better and better, and it feels thus natural to apply them to address the problem of data preservation for future content access. In this paper, we virtualized a number of existing servers and clients and ran the virtual machines under VMware´s hypervisor. Not all of the investigated operating systems could be virtualized successfully, and even with successful conversions often settings had to be reconfigurated, and support for particular devices had to be added manually. It is concluded that many operating systems are not flexible enough to allow for a problem-free conversion to a virtual machine.