Assuming you have recent and non-homebrew Intel hardware, you can probably run ESXi, although VMware Server will work. (Although I heavily suggest using ESXi over VMware Server where possible.)
ESXi is a snap, quite fast, and I've never had an issue running XP or any Windows boxen under it. It's also free as in beer. --- Puryear IT, LLC - Baton Rouge, LA - http://www.puryear-it.com/ Active Directory Integration : Web & Enterprise Single Sign-On Identity and Access Management : Linux/UNIX technologies Download our free ebook "Best Practices for Linux and UNIX Servers" http://www.puryear-it.com/pubs/linux-unix-best-practices/ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dan Parsons Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 3:17 PM To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [lopsa-discuss] virtualizing XP under Linux and remote IEtesting If your hardware doesn't support ESXi, I suggest trying "VMware Server", also free. It doesn't run on the "bare metal", but it does run very well and works with almost any Linux distribution: http://www.vmware.com/products/server/ I've successfully used it to virtualize WinXP systems in the past, specifically for Mac web developers to test on, actually. It has a pretty nifty web management interface. Dan On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 6:45 AM, Ryan Pugatch <[email protected]> wrote: Edward Ned Harvey wrote: > > I find that Xen is great for virtualization of linux inside of linux ... And > for nothing else. In fact, whenever I have a non-linux guest inside of Xen, > I find Xen is unstable. I have a server with windows & linux guests inside > of xen on RHEL5 host ... and about once per month, xen will lose its mind, > and the memory of one machine becomes the memory of another. Solution is to > reboot all the guests and host. And yes, performance is terrible, except > for linux in linux. > > For either linux or mac hosts ... Sun Virtualbox is a pretty good choice. > It has some bugs here and there ... but it does in fact have "guest > extensions" or whatever they call it ... So the guest stability and > performance is very good. > > If you only use your virtual machine casually, you can't beat the price of > virtualbox. But if you use it all day every day, such as I do ... I run > windows inside of mac every day, and I also run windows inside of ubuntu > every day ... Then I find virtualbox is just simply too buggy and kloogy. > > On the mac, either parallels or vmware fusion is the professional way to go. > In fusion, you must remember to install VMWare Tools, and in parallels, you > must remember to install Parallels Extensions. If you do this, performance > is near 100%. I personally prefer fusion for performance and reliability > reasons, but parallels is slightly more featureful. Both are good choices, > with neither having a large edge over the other in any way. > > On linux, VMWare Workstation is the professional way to go. Beware versions > though. Check the vmware compatibility guide. I find VMWare Workstation is > typically only compatible with hosts a rev behind ... For example ... > Workstation works fine on ubuntu 904, but not 910. But by the time 1004 > comes out, I think 910 will be supported. > I agree that Linux inside Linux with Xen is good. I definitely need a solution to virtualize Windows on a server rather than having the devs virtualize on their local machines. I regularly use Virtualbox locally and like it and have thought about setting up a server with a group of headless VMs under it, but I am unsure of how Virtualbox performs in that setup. Definitely looking for a server rather than workstation solution so perhaps VMWare Server may be the way to go. Thanks for your thoughts. Ryan _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
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