Unfortunately a Virtualized environment isn't going to be of much use for multimedia/gaming purposes. Most of the hardware is emulated in the guest os.
I have a consolidated HTPC and Desktop that I built for use at my girlfriends place and it works fine. My secret was to use a dual-head video card. ;) -Tharin O. 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
