virtualisation - which is better windows or linux

[justdeb]

Hi All,

I have been lucky enough to acquire a machine which has dual socket 771 (2.8Ghz Quad core Xeons, 16GB ECC RAM, quad GB NICS). Now the question i have is as follows.....

I am looking to virtualize linuxmce - what underlying os is better, windows XP/7 64 bit or Linux (ie ubuntu, Fedora)?

In terms of storage capacity it has 3TB on board and the SAS box that i scored with it has dual Fibre cards and the storage array has 16 TB....

Any thoughts on O/S and what virutalisation software to run? I use vmware for several things currently and also started playting with virtualbox in a windows environment .

I realise there has been questions and info posted in the wiki - but i want to do this right the first time as i have several environments that need to be virtualised.

As always thanks in advance to all.

Regards

Justin

[lemming86_au]

Hi Justin,

Go with dedicated virtual machine layer, rather that an OS with VM software, much more reliable.
Personally, I use VMWare ESXi, works a treat.

Regards,
Josh

[colinjones]

justdeb, what is your objective in virtualising? you will almost certainly never achieve satisfactory video performance (either graphics drawing or video decoding) so generally you are looking at virtualising a dedicated core only, no hybrid or MDs. This usually means most of the value of virtualising is lost, there are still some reasons, but not very mainstream ones... one of the main advantages of LMCE is that you don't need Big Iron to run it on, the devices can be very low end, low power, low cost... throwing such a big box at it for no particular reason is kinda pointless...

as Josh says... if you want a desktop environment and occasionally need to run another platform as well, then use some virtualisation software on Windows or Linux. But if the virtual machine(s) is the main application, never run this in virtualisation software over another OS layer! You should always use a true hypervisor...

[skeptic]

I dual boot my desktop with Windows/Linux.  On both hosts I run virtualbox MDs.  After installing the vbox client drivers the performance, including video, is just fine.

If you are looking for a permanently visualized server running multiple client images, I'd look into Xen.  Never used it myself, but it's free/opensource so you can give it a shot for the cost of some time.

[janka]

I can recommend Proxmox: http://pve.proxmox.com

Runs KVM and openVZ machines, easily maintained from a web interface.

Bare metal installer. Debian based.

jan

[justdeb]

Collin,

The main thought behind using the machine mentioned previously is that i have 2 grunty workstations which are used purely for number crunching, 1 windows xp machine and of course 1 core LMCE machine. I don't play games or do any decoding on the machine so i am not too worried about having performance issues in that regard. All of this sits in my study and i have crap everywhere. My aim was to consolidate my mess into just the one machine as it has enough grunt to do all of the tasks happily as far as i can see.

Skeptic - i am currently running a virtual box on my xp machine with Linuxmce as a trial and it seems to be ok - which is why the question was initially asked as i scored this box with huge potential so i thought why not go down this track and either run XP with virtuals hanging off it OR start with ESXI and then create my virtuals directly on it.

If i do go down the fully virtualised server  - has anybody tried ESXI with a image running Linuxmce ?


Justin

[mythtified]

One other thing to consider is connecting to external hardware from either usb or serial.  I use virtual box on a windows platform.  I have not tried it on linux yet.  But it seemed that some hardware that required either usb or serial would not connect to the virtual machine.  I don't know if that is true in all cases but, in my case, I wanted to temporarily run active home pro and test some older x10 hardware to make sure it worked before putting it on LMCE.  I could not connect to either my usb CM15A nor the CM11 I had.  I ended up installing a second hard drive and dual booting.  Just something else to consider.