On VMWare: 1.. You can bounce a guest without affecting either guests or the underlying OS. 2.. VMWare Workstation, Server both use the already installed OS and are simply applications hosting VM's - ESX is their proprietary OS (Linux Kernel) with the VM support functionality built in - obviously a much smaller OS footprint than Win2k3 or XP, but it really is a dedicated VM server at that point since you're not going to be using it for anything else. 3..For Server and Workstation I think you can really only tell it how many CPU's you want to dedicate and how much memory when you set up the guest. ESX allows much finer grained control and implements thresholds on resource usage. 4..Haven't thought about VM's for gaming sessions I would think there would be a pretty big performance hit. One gfx card is all I've ever had to work with on vm installs and have had 12 to 16 per box in server environments, though you're really only hitting the gui for maint and app installs. Workstation and probably to a lesser extent server should support the the functionality of the vid card since normally if the base OS can see it, the guest inside it can see it with ESX there's always issues with it being able to detect hadware.
On 12/21/07, Brian Weeden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I wanted to pick everyone's brain a bit about building a > virtualization machine (vm). > > Right now I have 2 machines, my main desktop and my HTPC. I would > like to consolidate them into one box. It would be in my office > behind the wall where the A/V rack is for the home theater. The goal > would be to have 3 VMs running at all times: > > 1 dedicated to HTPC functions with video out from the card to the A/V rack > Either 1 work XP VM OR 1 gaming Xp VM > 1 VM linux web server > > The hardware would be an Intel quad-core (probably Q6600), 4GB of > DDR2. I would like to continue using my Radeon Sapphire X1950XT card > but I think that might be a problem. It has 2 DVI outputs with HDCP > but I'm not sure how it would work if I tried to game and feed a DVD > at the same time. > > Questions I need to get answered before I can pull this off: > > - If you install some new software or have another reason to reboot > one of the VM instances > can you just restart it and avoid rebooting the whole machine? > > - When you boot up, is there a primary OS that loads and then you run > the different VMs inside of it or do you boot straight to a VM? > > - Can you divvy up the resources for running multiple VMs at once so > like each gets a GB of RAM and 2 cores? > > - Would I need 2 Video cards, one associated with the HTPC VM and one > associated with the Work/gaming VM? > > - If I do need 2 cards, how would that work hardware wise? Never done > it before in the same box. Do I just get a board with 2 PCI-Express > slots and slap a card in each? We're not talking about SLI here - but > two different cards working independently. > > -- > Brian Weeden > -- -jmg -sapere aude
