Heenan, Lambert
Lambert.Heenan at chartisinsurance.com
Fri Sep 25 14:01:17 CDT 2009
Thanks for that Gustav. I wonder, can one 'dual boot' a vmware system. What I mean is can you have a native OS (Say XP) on one partition that boots normally, and be able to optionally boot the VMWare environment instead. That way I could install it on another partition to check it out. Otherwise I'd need some 'naked hardware' to check it out on. Lambert -----Original Message----- From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Gustav Brock Sent: Friday, September 25, 2009 2:45 PM To: dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com Subject: Re: [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.... _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com