Anyone out there know about virtualisation?

[andrewducker]

I have two general cases of use for my desktop:
1) Surf the web and check email. For which a Linux desktop would work perfectly well.
2) Play games. For which I need Windows. And no, I will not spend weeks of my life faffing with WINE or somesuch. Just no.

What would be awesome would be to use some kind of virtualisation to have both operating systems loaded at the same time, and only switch into the one which has antivirus software and all sorts of additional crud installed when I needed to. Not rebooting between them, as this would be clunky and take significant chunks of time, but something more instant.

However, so far as I understand, doing so would be tricky, as things like 3D graphics don't run well from inside a virtualised OS. And so if I was doing that I'd lose the ability to do the thing I find Windows useful for.

Is this actually the case, oh well-educated friends list and passing people? Or is it something I could set up fairly easily?

Comments

[pseudomonas]

Something else to bear in mind, is that (AIUI) if you have Windows in a virtual environment, it doesn't think it's running on the machine it was sold for and stops working, or at least stops security-updating, for your comfort and convenience. This (again, AIUI) applies if you use Windows that's sold with a machine, rather than paying a couple of hundred pounds for a separate copy — if you do the latter then you can use it in a virtual machine, but only (thricely, AIUI) the one virtual machine.

[andrewducker]

I have a copy of Windows Ultimate, thanks to the joys of a brother who works for Microsoft. (Ok, Lionhead, but same difference.)

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

MS Hyper-V virtual machines use the system hardware (Steven has some set up and they use the sound/graphics card just fine)... but I can't see how that'd actually help you, cos if running Linux from within Windows would do the job, you'd be doing it....

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

"A linux desktop would work perfectly well" is not the same as "I have to use Linux for this" - why does Windows for surfing and email not work? And is there a reason Linux In A VM On A Windows Host doesn't work for you?

[andrewducker]

I like playing with my Windows install. My desktop is covered in crud. My Installed Programs is full of more crud. It would be nice to have a second OS installed that had no crud, so that it is less jerky some of the time, and liable to do Odd Things.

If I'm running Windows already, then the VM inside of it will keep getting interrupted by the base OS doing Odd Things, I assume, which would defeat the purpose. What I really want is a base virtualisation host that runs both Windows and Linux inside of it, and allows me to say "Put Windows on Hold so that I don't have to worry about it suddenly deciding to churn the hard disk like crazy for some random reason." and go do email/web stuff in the other OS.

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Actually it sounds to me like you want to have a VM with the crud in it, and keep a clean host OS rather than the other way around ;)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

So what you kind of want is a hypervisor running on bare hardware (VMWare has a couple of free ones!) and then two desktop virtual machines.

Except I don't know of any virtual machine controller like that that can run Skyrim properly, and you'd need a THIRD machine to connect to your VMs anyway.

Thought: Clean windows machine, runs nothing except hardware-capable VMs. One of those is Windows (a dirty Windows desktop VM on a Windows VM-host machine) and one is Linux.

[andrewducker]

That sounds feasible. Next time it all needs reinstalling I'll give that a go.

I take it I'd need separate partitions for each one of those operating systems? Or can the virtual installs just have fake hard drives on the actual one?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Fake hard drives on the real drive will work for every vm-as-app I'm aware of. You'll just have a folder with some REALLY BIG files with extensions like .vhd.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Yes to these things. I run a WinXP VM on the Mac Mini @ work (and two or three Beardian boxes for dev & test) under VMWare Fusion, which all works jolly nicely. Being able to snapshot the VMs so I don't have to zap & reinstall the things is a time-saver, too. One can also share sections of directory tree across the VMs, which saves mucking about with fileservers.

At home I only have an Unbongo VM running in a VMWare player, mostly for the purposes of poking malware sites with a stick. I'd likely have a set more VMs running, but the CPUs I have are just slightly too old to support HW virtualisation, which means running hackintosh images is out, and I only have the one screen at home - I've got used to being able to give each VM its own screen, which makes a chap much more productive.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

As I said, MS Hyper-V would do this job.

[andrewducker]

So you did!

Looks like I will have some digging to do next time I reinstall!

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Xen has a new VGA passthrough which, if you've got VT-X (which I assume you do), basically presents the real graphics hardware to the guest OS. So I gather that lets you play 3D games, but I don't know what the performance overhead is.

[allorin.livejournal.com]

Serious question - don't you have a tablet?

[andrewducker]

No. I've used them on several occasions though. And until it can handle having 30 tabs open that I can see along the top, typing at decent keyboard speeds, and a 22" screen for videos, they aren't replacing my main browsing experience :->

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

Apple fanboi!

[andrewducker]

There are now some Android tablets I could be tempted by.

But only really as comic readers, and occasional browsing.

[allorin.livejournal.com]

Haha! I carefully substituted the word 'tablet' for what I really wanted to say.

Posted from my iPad

Virtualisation

[ajax-nz.livejournal.com]

Righty...

Sounds like you don't want either os to be primary, but you need hardware acceleration for games.

Hardware gaming means windows (pretty much) has to be a real OS, but then the other one is a 2nd class citizen. Hyper visor with vt-x might be possible but the free versions of both VMware and xen don't do that any more, so you are into server costs there.

The best solution I've found is the one that macs+VMware fusion does (and can be done with virtualbox etc too) which is to have both os's installed as real hardware systems, but also set up to run as VMs within the other.

That way, most of the time you run Linux with windows in a VM (fine for office, utilities etc, but can't run games). But you can reboot into windows for serious gaming. From windows you can run the Linux in a vm too.

I find it gives the best of both worlds.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

I'd repartition and multi-boot. That's the only way you'll get the performance and isolation you want.

[ggreig]

In the unlikely event of running one of the expensive editions of Windows 7 (Ultimate or Enterprise), you wouldn't necessarily have to do the repartitioning to get reasonable performance, as you could boot off a VHD.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Aren't you always going to take a performance hit with virtualisation, so just setting up a dual boot system (with drives/partitions set up for access from both OS's) might be preferable? Especially if the boot times aren't an issue.

[fub.livejournal.com]

Low-tech solution: get a really cheap Atom-based nettop, and use that to surf and do e-mail. KVM-switch to hook it up to your existing desktop infrastructure is a nice (but optional) extra.

[andrewducker]

£175 for something like that. Not bad. I'd need a KVM, as I don't have the desk space for multiple keyboards/monitors, but that's something worth considering. Cheers!

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

I often see people say stuff like "if you're only surfing the web, doing email and some word processing, then you'll only need a low powered computer". That has never been my experience. The web is the thing that most often brings my computer to a crawl, and it's getting heavier year by year as people find new ways to suck up bandwidth and CPU time.

So, unless planning to visit a whole pile of HTML/CSS only websites, do not rely on a cheap Atom-based nettop.

[fub.livejournal.com]

I have been relying on such a thing for a few years now for all of my desktop computing needs. Media playback is choppy sometimes (and don't even try to play 720p MKV files), but for web and email it's quite OK by my standards. But by all means, do upgrade the memory, because more is obviously better.

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

It probably doesn't help that I have eleventy bazillion tabs open at any one time! But there are a few places (stuff like Facebook, or websites with static backgrounds and transparencies), where it can get very slow.

[johnbobshaun.livejournal.com]

I'd recommend two computers, a corner desk and a chair that swivels.

I think any virtualised solution is going to kill your performance even if you get the 3D drivers running.

There's always Cedega and Crossover. I've used both (not with a huge amount of success) but it depends what you're playing.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

(just for completeness, you could have mentioned why dual-boot wasn't your first choice, and why, say, Firefox on Windows isn't a solution.)

[andrewducker]

I'm currently using Firefox on Windows, and I get fed up because I have lots of crud installed that causes crunchiness and Odd Behaviour. Having an install that is Email/Web only, without anything else installed, would hopefully fix that.

Dual boot means taking multiple minutes between playing a game/reading my email. I don't want that.