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

[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!