[dba-Tech] FW: Your Blueprint: Optimizing Your Desktop Using VirtualBox

Hi Arthur and Lambert

You are looking for the VMware ESXi Hypervisor:

http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/features.html 

As for MS Virtual PC, it runs on Windows only. However, it is said to "reuse" a lot of the resources of the hosting OS, thus the sum of ram and resources consumed by a host OS plus a guest OS might be lower than that for, say, a Linux OS hosting a VMware guest with Windows OS. 
Thus, if you plan to run a setup with Windows guest OSs only, it might be a good combo having Windows 64-bit running as host OS for a collection of Virtual PCs with various Windows OSs. I having investigated this further, so I have no real life figures. 

/gustav


>>> Lambert.Heenan at chartisinsurance.com 25-09-2009 20:27 >>>

 In theory I'd say you are right, but the problem is probably that there has to be some sort of reasonably proficient OS to run the thing on top of as *something* has to provide the underlying services: you know dull stuff like disk access, screen updates, port management etc.

So I guess it boils down to which base OS has smallest footprint: Windows, OS X, Linux, or Solaris which are the major OS platforms that VirtualBox will run on (though there are no guest additions for OS X).


Lambert

-----Original Message-----
From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Arthur Fuller
Sent: Friday, September 25, 2009 11:38 AM
To: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues
Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] FW: Your Blueprint: Optimizing Your Desktop Using VirtualBox

Although I have made everything work satisfactorily, I still am mystified and concerned that things are inverted. It seems that I must run a basic OS, whether Ubuntu or XP or Windows Server, and then run VirtualBox inside this OS. This seems to be fundamentally backwards: the first thing that boots ought to be a minimal OS + VirtualBox or any similar VM manager: the lowest level ought to be just that -- no applications at all, save the VM manager, thus preserving the max RAM for the VMs. Given such a layout, I could then create a dozen VMs and stuff only the apps of interest into each of them, e.g. Vista in one, XP in another, Ubuntu in another, etc.
This is pretty much what I do anyway, despite the overhead of the first OS, but I currently live with it (and also with my impecuniousness -- would love to cram 8GB in this sucker!). Ah well, another day....