Recommendations For Home Virtualization? 384
An anonymous reader writes "I'll have to upgrade my home computers sometime in the next few months and I'm thinking it's time to swallow the virtualization pill. Besides the ease of switching between Windows and Ubuntu, I'm looking mainly for the ability to save machine state in order to be able to revert to a known working state. Googling turns up mostly guides from 2009 and earlier. Is VMWare ESX pretty much the way to go? Performance does matter — not for gaming but I am heavily into photography, so apps like Lightroom and Photoshop need to run well. Thanks for any insight."
Give VirtualBox a try! (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.virtualbox.org/
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I second that. VirtualBox is pretty awesome.
Re:Give VirtualBox a try! (Score:4, Informative)
I agree, VirtualBox is a lot easier to set up and run, is easy to maintain, and easy to move images between machines. It's what I've been recommending to everyone for a while now.
He wants to run Photoshop and Lightroom in it though. I don't know how well that does with the virtualized video cards on any platform though. I know there are a lot of games I can't play in a virtualized environment, only for that reason. If I could, I wouldn't have a real Windows bootable partition at all.
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IMO if he wants to do that sort of thing, he should run Linux in VirtualBox on a Windows 7 host, and run Photoshop and friends on the host. Best of both worlds, right? That's what I do, except I use the Windows host mostly for gaming...
I also set up an OSX VM so I can write iPhone apps. I just posted a tutorial on setting that up on my blog; click my Homepage link to get there.
Re:Give VirtualBox a try! (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux VM on a Windows host? Isn't that like building a cement house on top of a wooden foundation? :)
If VirtualBox makes that an attractive solution, then perhaps investigating other options like VMWare is worth it!
Re:Give VirtualBox a try! (Score:4, Informative)
If I weren't a PC gamer, I would certainly do it the other way around (Linux host, Windows VM). The reality of PC gaming is such that I have little choice in the matter.
I used to dual-boot as a solution, but it got tiring having to reboot all the time. Running a Linux VM on a Windows host instead gets me exactly what I need: access to both arbitrary games and arbitrary linux tools without having to reboot :)
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Doh.
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Re:Give VirtualBox a try! (Score:5, Informative)
Use the export function. This will export the VM in OVF format, which is a portable format you can move to anywhere, even to vmware.
Re:Give VirtualBox a try! (Score:5, Informative)
Export then import. It's easy.
I made an image for someone on my Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit machine, so they could use it on their Mac. I exported it, they imported it, and everything ran flawlessly. They were delighted.
And yes, you can run a machine from the command line. I have OpenVPN Access Server in a virtual machine running on my Linux server. OpenVPN Access Server didn't want to run natively on one of my physical server, so I stuck it in a box. :) Xorg is not running on the server (for obvious reasons), so it just starts at boot time with: /opt/VirtualBox/VBoxHeadless -startvm OpenVPN
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I run VirtualBox on a 3GHz 64-bit Core 2 Linux host. Both Debian and Ubuntu have a frustrating long-term bug that makes sound choppy and unusable for Windows guests. That said, I still run it (since I'm doing 'systems' stuff and no multimedia).
My current system is actually pretty awesome:
1. The host Linux OS has a Samba share that is joined via winbind to...
2. A guest running Windows Server 2008 R2.
Clients are my other machines, and a slew of VMs running XP, Windows 7, and Linux.
I get bare-metal file server
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Thread over. We have a winner. OP said s/he wasn't interested in 3d gfx, so the matter is settled. :D
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Yep. About the only negative about VB is that its USB-emulation speed is pants. We tested that here at work and VMware is about 10x faster when accessing hard drives via its emulated USB.
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Yup Go with VirtualBox. If performance is a worry solve it with hardware.
The new AMD G34 Opterons with 8 cores are under $300 and you can get a mother board for it for not much more. They will support high end video cards as well.
Before Anyone gets too bent over the price of hardware I am suggesting it is about the same as the price of the software he is using.
Also load it with RAM and you will be good to go.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182240 [newegg.com]
And for the CPU
http://www.newegg.com/ [newegg.com]
Re:Give VirtualBox a try! (Score:4, Interesting)
I have VirtualBox on a new iMac with Ubuntu and WinXP VMs running just perfectly.
It's a really nice system. Much smaller than VMWare too.
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I consider myself fairly competent when it comes to computers/Linux/Windows and I was never able to get Xen to do anything but throw errors and waste hard drive space... things may have changed in the past year and a half or so since I tried, but VirtualBox is dead simple to create and manage VMs. (It has a GUI for one.)
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yes, that is what esx or esxi are.
VitrtuaBox (Score:5, Informative)
Re:VitrtuaBox (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:VitrtuaBox (Score:4, Interesting)
+1 for VirtualBox. Why you'd use ESX I have no idea. I'd probably second choice VMWare Server, which is also free and works equally well.
Re:VitrtuaBox (Score:5, Informative)
If your'e looking to have a specialized server that ONLY hosts VM's, then there is some merit to running ESXi. It's free too, and the resource footprint is pretty small. Personally, I would only use VirtualBox or VMWare Server in cases where I still wanted to use the machine running the VM's as a desktop in it's own right. Otherwise, ESXi is the way to go. That said, I DO use my home desktop to serve VM's in addition to regular desktop usage, so it runs Virtualbox :). I use ESXi for virtualizing servers at work though.
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I use ESXi on a box at home to host about 6 VMs. the base OS is about 70MB so it's got a tiny footprint on the server and most of the resources go to the VMs. For a dedicated box it's a great solution. For running VMs on a computer that's doing more than that VirtualBox is great.
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Absolutely, that makes perfect sense if you're talking about dedicated boxes, but that doesn't sound like it's the case here.
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I have three basic systems at home:
The desktop and notebook have usually one or occasionally two guests open. The ESXi host runs about a dozen guests simultaneously, including a fairly complete Windows 2008 R2 domain, a Linux server, a Linux workstation, and a Windows
Re:VitrualBox (Score:3, Informative)
VirtualBox works very well using Linux as a host, plus you get experimental DirectX/OpenGL acceleration support... (VMware Workstation charges extra for that, though I have no idea how well it actually works)
ESX is for enterprises running servers. You'll be missing out on a lot of hardware support, just to gain a few extra MB of RAM (cheap!) and a few CPU cycles. Also it's a pain :P
Last I checked a few months ago, VMware Workstation / Server on Linux still uses a file on disk to back the virtual machine'
Re:VirtualBox (Score:2, Informative)
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I'm posting this reply using Ubuntu 10.4 on XP Pro SP3 running on a Core2Duo with 3 GB of RAM. It works on Win7, too.
Get as much memory as you can for best performance. The minimum machine I've run it on is a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 with 2 GB of RAM shared evenly between the ho
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There are a couple of other caveats to it as well. It doesn't handle USB devices as nicely as VMWare (I was able to run USB EVDO cards from inside
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I use USB with virtual box all the time. If it doesn't work automatically just map it as a shared folder.
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That's great if your USB device is a drive. There are many other types of USB devices than just drives.
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Virtual box USB is specifically included in the free but closed source version. They also have an open source version you can compile yourself, but that doesn't include the USB sub-system.
Don't do it (Score:5, Insightful)
I use VMWare Workstation for much of each day to run MS Office Apps, and it's very useful - but no VM performs well graphically.
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Re:Don't do it (Score:4, Informative)
You're right in principle, however if he uses Windows as the host OS, then he can run his image software natively, then run Linux in the VM.
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I would never ever do things that way. I'm setting this up for my gf, and the Windows virtual machine will be set up with no external network access of any kind. Having Windows as a host OS kills much of the benefit you get from virtualization.
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Why would you put something that's a large target for viruses as a host? That doesn't make sense to me.
If you get a virus in Windows as a VM, you simply rollback to a previous state. You can't do that with a host as easily, and you lose the functionality of the PC while that's happening. If you run all your Windows machines in a VM, you can quickly switch to a backup copy without having to wait for some virus cleaner, disk defragmentation, system update that requires a reboot...
It just makes more sense t
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Use the VM for all those other dangerous apps such as Web Browsing, email, Facebroke, Flitter, hosting a web server, etc.
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Or you could always switch to the Gimp [gimp.org] and Rawstudio [rawstudio.org] and/or RawTherapee [rawtherapee.com] under Linux.
A few suggestsions (Score:4, Informative)
For stable server virtualization vmWare ESXi is pretty much the king at the moment, unless you want to pay an insane amount. It's free (as in beer) stable, easy to manage, fast and scalable. Sadly the management tools are windows only, I highly recommend it, if you have suitable hardware.
For workstations it's a bit less clearcut. Generally you want a primary OS in your workstation where you do most of your work, and secondary OS that you boot up in a virtualized environment. The three primary choises are KVM, XEN and OpenVS. They all have performance penalties, and I am not aware of any clear cut advantage for any of the three. I would suggest you go with what is default in your favourite linux distribution, as maintaining virtualization infrastructure isn't an especially fun task.
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"Sadly the management tools are windows only"
I would not know about the windows management tools I only use the command line tools so your statement is not entirely true.
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How do you configure the system initially, and actually get a console on one of the guest OS?
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You can use http://pve.proxmox.com/ [proxmox.com] for a KVM OpenVZ virtualization machine, management is web enabled and you could log to the machines by openVNC, somewhere there is a howto to enable SPICE for better multimedia integration.
If you could affored a Redhat Virtualization for Desktops it could be an interesting option as SPICE is enabled as default.
Regards.
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Don't forget VMWare workstation. That's what I run at home (for almost two years now). I wouldn't want to do without it now.
Depending on what you're doing, VMWare Workstation doesn't have a whole lo
Desktop virtualization? (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean desktop virtualization? Do you need to run 2+ OSes at the same time? That's what virtualization is for. Or do you need to just suspend and restore states? You can get away with hibernation for that. Or do you mean go back in time to a known working configuration? Windows can do that (System Restore), but I don't really see why you would need that on your main machine. If you're trying stuff out, you should try it inside the VM anyway (you use Workstation or VirtualBox for that).
ESX is nice, but it's not what you think. You don't get a local console (last time I checked, anyway), you're supposed to access it from SSH or VNC. It also designed for datacenter stuff (like SAS disks and controllers. It doesn't support IDE for example). You're looking for VMWare Workstation (Paid) or VirtualBox (free for non-commercial use), which are pretty fast. Paravirtualization (ESX or XEN) will give ~98% speed on Linux (on a PV kernel) and Windows only works well if you use GPLPV drivers, otherwise is slow as hell.
I'd just recommemd you stay away from virtualization if you're just a desktop user. Unless you're trying out shareware/malware/stuff that can break your install. If you're upgrading, why not use the old machine to try ESX, XEN and other stuff and figure out yourself how you want to use it? Stick to dual-boot for now.
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I'll second ESX being a SERVER VIRTUALIZATION ONLY. We use it at work, and it doesn't give you a "Desktop". You need to use RDC, or SSH (or direct connect through their Windows client) to get a desktop on the Virtual Machines.
As far as DESKTOP VMs solutions: :) ). As part of the migration I turned her old XP laptop into a VM, and installe
I just did a migration of my wife from her XP machine to a new Windows 7 machine (hey, she wants/needs it for her work, I'm happier with Linux/OSX, so to each their own
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I'll second ESX being a SERVER VIRTUALIZATION ONLY. We use it at work, and it doesn't give you a "Desktop". You need to use RDC, or SSH (or direct connect through their Windows client) to get a desktop on the Virtual Machines.
ESXi 4.02 seems to have a console tab in the vSphere client that contradicts this statement unless I am misunderstanding you.
The only problem I have with ESXi is its piss poor handling of USB disks. For me this would rule it out as desktop virtualisation platform.
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You CAN connect to them via the Console tab, but then you're using the vSphere client (instead of the RDC or SSH client) so its still not the same as a Desktop, but you're right, I did forget to include that.
I've found the Desktop tab in the version of ESX we use (3.5 I think) to be very slow for anything involving graphics (of course its over a network). Usually we just use it for a remote console to some Linux box.
Re:Desktop virtualization? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd recommend the exact opposite.
Virtualization rocks for keeping things separate. My personal machine has a quad core CPU with 8GB of RAM. I've got 2-3 VMs running most of the time so I can keep things separated and do different things. It also lets me have Linux, FreeBSD and Windows guests without the power/space requirements of multiple machines.
VMWare workstation is only about $200 or so (maybe even $150), and I gather Server is free (but at the time running it on Vista 64 wasn't very easy). The ability to snapshot machines or sandbox things is really awesome. It also allows me to have multiple dev environments set up which don't interfere with each other, and a quick linked clone of a machine gives me a disposable test-bed in about 3 minutes if I think I need something new and isolated.
The only thing I regret is that my CPU is one notch down from being able to do 64-bit guests because I wasn't aware of that at the time.
For me, a big machine with loads of RAM and disk and VMWare makes for a really sweet setup. If you've got the resources on the box, it really does make some things easy. Soon I'll migrate my second physical box (an old XP machine) into a VM so I can keep some legacy software installs going without worrying about an aging machine.
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the new ver's of Photoshop does use video cards (Score:3, Informative)
the new ver's of Photoshop does use video cards for speed up. You can make images and save the VM over head and have the easy fall back.
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Modern versions of KVM allow you to pass through PCI devices to a guest OS, would this work installing a secondary videocard in the host system and passing it to the guest?
Experience with IOMMU? (Score:2)
I'd like to run a virtualized copy of windows with direct hardware access (passthrough) to my video card - for games and bluray playback.
I've seen a couple of messages talking about it, but not much in the way of a guide or a list of gotchas.
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Sorry, no can do.
You will not be able to use the proprietary NVidia or ATI/AMD drivers in an OS (Windows or Linux) in a virtualized environment.
I don't know why exactly. Maybe software is the only roadblock, and drivers that are aware of virtualization will solve the issue. But it's also possible some trap instructions must be added to the video card hardware to enable virtualized performance as good as native performance. AMD and Intel have worked on the x86 instruction set to make virtualization be
In my experience, don't. (Score:3, Insightful)
Your question gives me pause on a few different levels:
A) You're not familiar with this technology. This is probably not the best way to get indoctrinated with VM's.
B) Other options for 'ease of switching' exist, like a KVM, Wubi, etc. These are likely to give you a more satisfactory result.
C) "Performance does matter" - yeah, no. Nobody uses VM's to increase their performance. They use them to save money, increase density, etc.
The tech is cool and has a number of really novel applications, but 'home use' and 'performance' are probably not among them unless you're some kind of super nerd. And if you were, you'd be too busy trying things out to spend time asking slashdot... :)
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Hogwash.
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Homonyms are fun! 'Your performance' is not equivalent to the performance of your hardware, and I assume you well know that.
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If you read the parent the way their statement was clearly meant, it would have been more like the following:
"Nobody uses VMs to improve their systems' performance" ...and it would be true. Your comment is interesting and useful, sure -- but accusing someone of "hogwash" based on a clear misreading is going a bit far.
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One example of where VM might "improve performance" is if you are trying to share one very powerful box rather than having a less powerful box run your other OS. In this situation, it's quite possible that even for computationally intensive tasks that you would be better off running in a VM. It all depends on what the landscape looks like.
Ultimately, you will have to try it out for yourself and see how it works.
Unless someone here has already done what you're asking about, they're just shooting in the dark
Re:In my experience, don't. (Score:4, Insightful)
A) You're not familiar with this technology. This is probably not the best way to get indoctrinated with VM's.
Quite the opposite. its how I always learned the ins, outs and plain 'don't do this again-ness' of various computer systems. The alternative is to read the documentation and find out what the manufacturer wanted you to learn.
Still, IO and Gfx performance is not something a VM is good at. Did I mention I also learn a lot by reading slashdot? :)
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no... 'cos then I wouldn't see any of my own posts. ;)
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Getting current information on a subject is how a nerd should start any endeavorer. That way you move on instead of repeat discoveries.
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*laugh* I'm running two VMs right now on my home machine with VMWare workstation. I occasionally run as many as three at the same time. VMWare is always running on this machine -- that was part of what I bought it for.
Buy a big honking machine with obscene amounts of RAM and disk space, and VMs are a pretty sweet thing. I use 'em at home for t
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I guess I just didn't read it that way. Again, though, if he was 'just putzing' then why ask. Just do it. No, it seemed more important to the poster than just a throw-away hobby project. But again, maybe I read that into it.
VMWare rocks for video (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm running 64-bit linux host with VMware Workstation and a Windows XP guest.
Performance all around is very very good. If you full screen the guest, you can't tell that it's running virtual unless you check for the VMware icon.
Video performance is OUTSTANDING, essentially native. Netflix videos play full screen with very little CPU overhead.
Suspend and resume can be slow if your guest has lots of RAM.
I recommend using XFS for the filesystem containing your VMware images. I've tried other filesystems but nothing can touch XFS when it comes to handling those enormous virtual disk files.
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Its true, but only with the latest VMWare Workstation (7.1), which is not one of their freebie offerings. Its not too expensive though.
http://www.vmware.com/products/workstation/new.html [vmware.com]
VMware Workstation was the first to support 3D graphics in virtualized environments and is now the first to support Windows Aero in Windows Vista and Windows 7 virtual machines. Run even more 3D applications with support for DirectX 9.0c Shader Model 3 and OpenGL 2.13D graphics in Windows virtual machines.
Virtualbox (Score:3, Informative)
Linux, KVM and virt-tools (Score:2)
I've been writing a lot of documentation for Linux virt-tools here [virt-tools.org].
Rich.
Virtulize what? (Score:2)
Servers or desktops are very different. There are plenty of server virt bits out there but for exporting desktops you pretty much looking at vnc or rdp screens so a pretty basic frame buffer, I don't think any of them will provide much performance in pushing the pixels.
linux KVM ftw (Score:2)
I tried vmware and it just pissed me off everytime there was an OS kernel update. Would have to recompile the vmware modules and half the time they wouldn't work. The last straw with vmware was clock skew problems on the guests. I had to practically sync the clock every *minute* in order to keep the guest clock from getting out of whack. Even using Chrony didn't keep it synced well. VMware had a lot of messages on it's forum about the problem but never did anything about it.
I use Linux KVM now and will
a simple answer (Score:2, Informative)
Best thing I ever did (Score:4, Informative)
I'm running multiple VM systems including VMWare Server, VMWare ESX, VMWare Workstation, xen, KVM and VirtualBox.
VMWare Server is going away and sort of a pain to manage. However, it was free and worked decently. I have since replaced it with VMWare Workstation on my desktop and laptop systems. I use VirtualBox on my Mac laptop because it's free and was the easiest/cheapest to get going.
On my servers I am running VMWare ESX, xen and KVM on AMD systems (mostly dual core, but a couple quad core systems in the mix).
VMWare ESX was the most finicky as to installation but has been pretty simple to manage. The remote console options are simple. The VSphere management client is Windows only though. There is support for command line administration, but it's somewhat of a bear. You can script around it though and many people have done so and provide scripts online. Check out the VMWare community pages. Support is so so..
Xen was my workhorse for the longest time, but since my primary OS is RedHat/CentOS and RH is moving towards KVM, I've also been moving to KVM. The GUI management tools work fine, but are not as polished as VMWare ESX. However, it very much makes up for it in being able to do just about everything from the command line. I can deploy an image with a single command and this works wonderfully for testing. Performance is awesome with both xen and KVM. Well, the caveat is that some network intensive stuff seems to be bottlenecking somewhere, but it only has a single gigabit NIC across 8 VMs. I'll be adding another NIC in the next couple weeks and either bonding the adapter or just splitting them up.
Be aware that client/guest images generally do not have video acceleration so many games will fail to load. If you're running VMWare Workstation on a laptop, or the more recent KVMs then there is some measure of acceleration, but not 100%. Also, sound can be finicky especially across the network.
Tips based on my experience (Score:2, Informative)
KVM, its the future. (Score:2)
If your system supports VT-x or the AMD equivalent the performance is very impressive, almost no noticeable difference. The virt-manager [redhat.com] produced by Red Hat makes creating and configuring virtual machines a snap with its friendly user interface.
It supports many useful things like, headless VNC mode (defaut), s
I'll second what most have said, but also mention (Score:2)
...Acronis. You can use it to image a machine, so that you can easily restore it to a known working state again later, even on different hardware. I'm a big fan of trayless disk caddies too, so you could have something like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817994076 [newegg.com] that would let you swap disks in and out easily. I like it because not only can I upgrade my machine on a new disk with no chance of thrashing my currently working machine, but I can also use the additional tray slots
One option ... (Score:2)
If you are doing it just for OS state reasons, and you're using Windows, is to just run Windows 7 and boot from a differencing VHD, keeping your data files outside of it.
Its no more complex than safely using virtualization to do what you want (and ensuring you don't lose data on a revert) but you're running bare-metal. Virtualization doesn't buy you much if you're just doing a single OS.
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For anyone considering Microsoft Virtual PC, please keep in mind that it cannot run 64-bit guests. For me this was a non-starter.
You don't want ESX (Score:2)
It's not really for you. While it does squeeze significantly more performance, especially with I/Os, out of a system. It is really too much enterprise and not enough desktop to make for a happy GUI experience. Virtualbox and VMware Workstation are excellent products, I would recommend running Linux VMs on a Windows host to maximize your Photoshop performance. I run the other way around, with Linux host and Windows guest because my important apps are Linux apps. For laptops I would also recommend the Linux-o
Need more data (Score:2)
As others have posted and others sill undoubtedly post, we need more information to give you the recommendation you want. Making some assumptions from your question, it sounds like you want to virtualize your workstation. For full baremetal performance, don't virtualize your primary OS. The technology isn't there yet, but VMWare is making huge strides with their VMView [wikipedia.org] product. Set up properly, you can have CAD running in a virtual machine on a server with a thin client displaying the output with very r
My experience (Score:2)
Okay here's my experience of using virtualization at home and with a bit of office work:
Xen - for the time I started using it in 2008, a really big advantage was paravitualization mode which allows to run virtualized linux instances really fast -- in that respect Xen is awesome, however there are several disadvantages: in theory you could run anything that supports paravirtualization mode, so that means you could run All the BSDs, but I never succeeded of installing any of them when I tried, windows of cour
VMWare Workstation (Score:2)
Performance for what?!! (Score:2, Funny)
My setup is quite awesome (Score:2)
I am very happy with my setup. And I arrived at this after much trial and error. I am mostly a Linux person but I reached a point in my life where I could not deny that I need both Windows and Linux to get stuff done. So I setup a quite beefy 6 core CPU machine to handle all my home computing needs and then some. You don't have to go all out like I did, if your needs are simpler. Here is the setup details:
CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1055T
Motherboard: GA-785GMT-USB3
Memory: 16GB
Hard Drives: 4 1TB RAID10
OS: Wi
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That depends...do you want one that functions autonomously, or do you want a cardboard cutout?
See here for research [wikipedia.org]****
****Note: Sarcasm
Re:One acronym: KVM (Score:5, Informative)
RHEL6 dumping Xen is actually a mistake. Not that KVM is bad, but Xen is actually really good and works well in production. The community is at fault for not trying to do more to integrate Xen into the kernel better.
But such is the way with open source. Dump a working solution in favor of an up and coming newbie with its own set of problems.
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KVM isn't perfect, and does lack some of the polish and features of products like Xen and VMWare, but in raw performance it kicks serious ass. However, it is not as easy as Virtualbox, so for home or desktop virtualization, VirtualBox gets my vote.
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Take a look at proxmox (http://www.proxmox.com), it provides a simple to install distribution bundled with kvm and a gui to manage it from...
It's aimed at server virtualisation which doesn't seem to be what the original poster wanted, but then he mentioned vmware esx which is also a server oriented hypervisor so who knows.
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You really don't understand linux.
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For many of the world Red Hat is Linux. Including Oracle.
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it's actually the full ESXi that's free now with the basic features. If you want things like clustering you can pay to enable those features.
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On the other hand, last time I checked, ESX was free, also, VMware Server was free too.
Why would server virtualization not work for home? I use WMware Server, but for, well, virtual servers and it works OK. I don't see why desktop use would be a problem.
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Your best bet might be just to pick up a cheap USB KVM and a refurb Intel Mac Mini, doubt it'd cost you more than $400-500 tops, as well as a modern copy of Pagemaker... and just have them working side-by-side. I find for moving stubborn users, having the "migration-target" right on the desk with them for a reasonable transition period ends up being the least painful way