Daniel Nashed's Blog

Using Virtual Machines and Linux container for software testing

Now that Notes and Domino 14.5.1EA1 shipped this week some admins & developers are looking for options to test out the new version without impacting their production environment.

This is more a challenge on client side then on server side.

If you have a notebook or Macbook where you can install software, there are a couple of good (and free options).
In a corporate environment often the only option is to use a remote VM.

But there are some good client choices if one of those tools can be installed in your environment.

Windows

For a quick test of software on Windows the Windows Sandbox is a very simple to use solution.
It can be configured with volume mounts and share the already running resources of your host Windows.
There can be only one Sandbox at a time and when you should down the Sandbox all data not hosted on a mount is gone.
But often for testing this is exactly what you want.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/application-security/application-isolation/windows-sandbox/


VMware Workstation Pro 25H2

VMware workstation is back in business and has a new version.
It is free for private and commercial use. You can install multiple VMs if you have sufficient resources and have the full flexibility of snapshots.

https://www.vmware.com/products/desktop-hypervisor/workstation-and-fusion


MacOS

On the Mac you have multiple options

VMware Fusion is one of them.
But there is also UTM


UTM

https://mac.getutm.app/

Both can be used to install either a MacOS or Windows.

For Windows VMs on older Intel Macs you would use standard Intel/AMD64 Windows.
For Apple Silicon you should always pick the Windows ARM edition -- which works well for Notes and Domino.


Avoid running Domino on Linux on Apple Silicon

Running Linux on the Mac sadly only works well with Intel hardware.
There are still issues with the JVM shipped with Domino.
This is true for native Linux and any kind of container environment like Docker and Rancher Desktop.


Domino servers on Linux

For Linux there are a couple of desktop options.
You can run it in the VM infrastructure of your choice like VMware Workstation Pro.

But there are more options to choose from.


Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

One great platform is WSL.
It is part of Windows and well integrated with Windows.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

You can access Windows disks using a standard enabled mount (e.g. /mnt/c) or the other way round access Linux volumes via Windows explorer.

Beside running a native Domino server on WSL you can also install a Docker host on WSL to run a Domino container.


Running Domino in Containers on Linux

This is one of the easiest and most flexible options.

The Domino container project allows you to build a standard or customized containers -- also with version 14.5.1 EA1.

You can run container images on

• WSL based Linux host with Docker or Podman
• Docker Desktop
• Rachner Desktop

https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop/
https://rancherdesktop.io/

Docker for Desktop is free for smaller companies, but commercial for larger companies.
But WSL and Rancher Desktop are great options to use as well.

Unless you are using Docker Desktop or Rancher Desktop for other work, it would make probably most sense to look into WSL.

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