general advie in regards to virtualization [closed]

Question

When you want the best of two worlds, as is the case with me, but also your comfort, then there's really only two options: Dual boot or virtualization. That much has always been clear.

Lets assume that dual boot isn't an option, because it really isn't, then we are left with virtualization and of course every school kid can make that work, but what if you want to have a setup that actually works well, with freedom to allocate resources, for different setups, be it server, desktop or something entirely different, etc.

Sure it's possible, but for it to work well... Lets just assume I've tried a number of times in the past and failed, which is also quite true.

Then I'm left to ponder what the ideal setup would actually be. Granted I do not know enough about the subject to actually determine what's possible and what's not, but I'm going to give it my best and then listen to your recommendations as to what is possible, preferable and how it may be achieved.

Basically I'm thinking that some sort of "foundation" is the best start. that is a setup specifically designed and optimized to host virtual machines. I should be somewhat surprised if this does not already exists, but I'm at a loss as to where to find further information on the subject and of course it can't be too expensive. Preferably it should be free of course.

Then if I have some huge 3d windows only game I want to play, I'll be able to setup a suitable environment. If I should want to setup a virtual minecraft server, that should be the least of it, making a virtual machine only for work related efforts should be the least of it, experimenting with you own custom search engine (yes that has actually been a dream of mine for a while) and so on and so forth.

I suppose my main concerns are how to achieve this and how to minimize performance loss, because I will not be investing 5 digit in to some hyper extreme rig just to be able to play some stupid game.

I do hope that you have something wise to say about this subject, even though I ahve stated no specific question. In the end after all, all I'm really looking for is perfection and that shouldn't be too hard right? ;)

Answer 1

This is merely a collection of thoughts you might find useful before embarking on a journey into the wonders of virtualised desktops, not a complete attempt at guiding or answering a question.

I've been meaning to test out xen for similar purposes as you mention, especially now that it has VGA passthrough, letting you (in principle) do graphics in any running domain. (Xen doesn't generally like Windows as it's "host" (dom0).) You might want to look for hardware and virtualisation software that supports IO virtualisation (VT-x or similar).

In my experience with qemu/kvm (linux and windows guests) and vmware workstation (windows host, many guests) performance has never been an issue. You should make sure your cpu supports hardware virtualisation, otherwise things will be rather slow.

The only failings I've had have been related to having far to little memory allocated to the vm instance, doing a variety of dumb things resulting in the vm disk image having awful access times (causing a variety of difficult-to-diagonose timeout problems in the guest) and some part of the Linux kernel's PAX making things slow in guests (probably related to NX or address relocation, it might have been fixed since).

Fanciful stuff: kvm supports nesting from kernel 3.1.0.

You might want to have a look at this list.