I have old computer with Intel Celeron 1.6Ghz dual-core processor, 3 GB RAM. What can I do with this computer so that it will be helpful?
Web server? Media server? Crowd Computing? Linux machine for learning purposes? Game server? It isn't bad config after all. The only problem might be power consumption.
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I'm trying to understand if Xen can fit my needs:
I need to have a Windows 7 image that I can copy to different machines (with different hardware) to have kind of default installation for every new entry in the office and faster replacement.
Is that possible to use the hypervisor for this?
Is that possible to use network boot as well of the hypervisor not to install Xen on every machine?
Edit: Will I be able tu use multiple displays?
Thanks.
It is possible if and only if you have installed Xen on every machine on your network that is not a good idea. Xen and other type-1 hypervisors are usually used to multiplex a high-end server into a set of virtual machines. Xen is also known for its para-virtualization technique which is not applicable for Windows.
Have you ever thought of VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) solutions? It enables you to have all your operating systems on a single machine and transfer the desktop to the clients.
If I install a bare-metal hypervisor (say, ESXi), would it allow me to run Windows 7 concurrently with Linux?
Would it allow me to run multiple instances of Windows 7?
When I'm sitting at the PC that's running Win7 and Linux on a hypervisor, which OS do I see when I look at the screen? (I'm suspecting that the only way to access either OS is to do a remote login.)
Assuming the answer to #2 is yes, how do you manage multiple installs of Win7 on the same hard drive?
Thanks in advance!
If you simply want to run Linux and Windows in parallel you may of course do this on e.g. ESXi. Still, the OSes would run with virtualized (or emulated) hardware available to them, i.e. you would not be able to easily access all the hardware directly and the hypervisor itself not only introduces an overhead but this overhead is not deterministic.
If you want to run an RTOS (like Real-Time Linux) or any other RTOS, then you need a "real-time hypervisor".
You can google for such hypervisors - there are a few out there.
(I dont want to recommend one here as we are a vendor of such a solution our selves)
Regards
GFL
I was wondering if there was a very simple and free virtual machine that would allow you to boot from a folder or disk image that couldn't damage my hard disk. I am using a MacBook and am looking into operating system programming. I found a tutorial on the internet that looked promising. I want to try this but using a VM instead of actually booting from a disk. If I made a folder or disk image containing the boot.bin file and wanted to try the OS I made (while booting from a folder or disk image, not a disk), is there a VM that would let me do it? I have no previous experience with virtual machines. I also want to be sure my hard disk would not be damaged.
If you can make a cdfs .ISO, any VM technology on the market today could do what you ask. VirtualBox, KVM, Xen, VMware, VMware Fusion (on the macbook), etc. Not sure if Parallels can work for you, though.
VMware's products can also boot from floppy images, which are simply binary blobs (for the most part).
On the Mac I think you're limited to VMware Fusion (maybe Parallels), but on Linux you have so many options.
virtualbox (formerly from Sun, now from Oracle) is probably the most powerful VM that you can run on all of Windows, Macs and Linux (OpenSolaris too of course;-) and is at the same time open source (and, of course, also free as in free beer). Whether it supports your new OS is not entirely certain (since it's oriented to supporting a specific list of "guest OS"s and of course your new one isn't there), but, what with it being free, it's surely worth giving it a try.
I am a MOSS developer. Based on what I read so far about SharePoint 2010, I probably have to look around for another development workstation - 64 Bit with some beefy RAM, and most importantly to figure out which version of OS to install (Windows 2K8 R2, or Windows 7 Ultimate).
I need some feedbacks from others who have gone before me with hand-on experiences in setting up their workstations for this purpose. I welcome any suggestion on the realistic "baseline" on hardware/software requirements.
SharePoint 2010 runs quite well on Windows 7. There are some manual steps in the installation, but they're well documented. So it's mostly a question of which OS you personally want to run.
I'm not sure yet what to make of the memory requirements. The recommendation for developer machines is 4 GB, and I'm running with 6 GB, without problems.
From my personal experience, running with 4GB of RAM on Windows 7 is definitely a bare minimum. You're going to want at least 6, and ideally 8GB.
On another note, Windows 7 Ultimate isn't required; just Windows 7 Professional or better.
My experience has been that 4GB of RAM just isn't enough. We are currently using 6GB with decent performance, but 8GB has been recommended to us. We are also using Windows Server 2008 R2.
If you use SQL, you will need to install CU5 as well.
Another thing you might want to think about, and I'd like to hear from others if they have any experience... is that your memory requirements may be less if you configure the minimum amount of service applications necessary for what you are doing.
We have a Virtual Machine created and we are using that on a 4GB RAM Windows 7 64 bit machine using the Sun Virtual Box. It seems ok for us and so far no probs. It is a good choice to give 3GB RAM dedicated to the Virtual Machine(Win 2K8/2K8 R2)
I am using VMware Server 1.0.7 on Windows XP SP3 at the moment to test software in virtual machines.
I have also tried Microsoft Virtual PC (do not remeber the version, could be 2004 or 2007) and VMware was way faster at the time.
I have heard of Parallels and VirtualBox but I did not have the time to try them out. Anybody has some benchmarks how fast is each of them (or some other)?
I searched for benchmarks on the web, but found nothing useful.
I am looking primarily for free software, but if it is really better than free ones I would pay for it.
Also, if you are using (or know of) a good virtualization software but have no benchmarks for it, please let me know.
From my experience of Parallels and VMware (on the PC and more extensively on the Mac) the difference between any 2 competing versions of the software is usually quite small and often 'reversed' in the next releases.
I never found Parallels to be much faster (or slower) than VMware - it often would be a case of the state of the VM I was running, the host machine itself and the app(s) I was running within the VM. If VMWare brought out a new release which did something faster, you could be sure that Parallels would improve their performance in that area in the next release, too.
In the end I settled on VMWare Fusion and the key reason for this was just that it played nicely with VMware Workstation on the PC. I have trouble taking Parallels VMs from the Mac to the PC and back again, and this worked fine on VMware. Finally, though this is less of a concern, I was unhappy that sometimes it felt as if Parallels would release a version without proper regression testing - you'd get the up-to-date version and find that networking was suddenly unexplicably broken until they released another patch a few days later. I doubt this is still the case but VMware always felt a little more 'in control' and professional to me.
I'd go for a solution that you can get running in a stable fashion on your PC, that is compatible with your other requirements (such as your co-workers' platforms and your overall budget). You can waste your lifetime trying to measure which one is faster at any given task!
One other thing - it's worth checking the documentation that comes with the software, and any forums etc, before making judgements about performance. For instance, in my experience throwing huge amounts of ram at your VM (at the expense of free ram in the host system) does NOT automatically make it faster; better to split the ram up evenly, and certainly keep an eye on any recommended figure. In VMware, that recommended figure is a good guide.
You'll get best performance if your hardware supports hardware virtualization, such as AMD's AMD-V or Intel's VT, and you enable this feature on the computer and in your virtualization software.
For Microsoft solutions, you need at least Virtual PC 2007 or Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, or Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 (I don't expect you'll rebuild your system just to run Hyper-V, but I thought I'd mention it).
Subjectively I haven't noticed any difference between Virtual PC and VMware Workstation performance; I'm using VMware now as it supports USB virtualization, which Virtual PC doesn't.
You also generally need to install appropriate custom, virtualization-aware, drivers in the guest OS, as the standard drivers are expecting to talk to real hardware. In Virtual PC and Server these are called Additions, in VMware they are VMware Tools.
Anandtech has some great info on virtualization. Although they are not any benchmarks, it provides a great insight on why it is so difficult to do proper virtualization benchmarks. I cannot suggest you a specific product, because it depends very much on your requirements.