I found VM’s very useful on my desktop and am thinking about using them on my laptop. I use Xen on my desktop and it works great, but I heard the xen on laptops doesn’t work very well and results in bad battery life/etc, so I was thinking to use VMWare player/server or maybe buy Workstation. Since my laptop doesn’t support AMD Vi/Intel VT-d, going the VMWare route would also give me 3d acceleration in Windows if I ever wanted it.
If I use VMWare, should I try to keep the host as strip down as possible or just use it like a regular install.
for Xen, are the problems for running Xen on a laptop universal, or would running some other OS as the Dom0 help?
Do you have any other suggestions?
About a year ago a friend of mine tried installing Xen on his laptop (just
for fun). Well, the Xen kernel did not support any powersaving mechanisms,
such as changing cpu freq.
Does xen run any other OS then Linux as Dom0??
Xen is for Server Virtualization.
VMWARE Server is not a good solution, because the product is dead, no support anymore.
Best Solutions for a Desktop or Notebook are VirtualBox and VMWARE Player…
But dont expect to much. 3D in a VM is not comparable to native access. Gaming mostly is not possible for newer games, older games may work.
Thx!
How does VMWare player compared to VMWare Workstation or Virtualbox? Is anything else good (KVM? QEMU?)
I’m not hoping for hard core gaming, more like KDE desktop effects or Aero.
For Aero you need a WDDM driver for the Guest. At the moment this only available for VMWARE (VMWARE Guest Tools).
Player is able to install guests. Workstation has more functions like snapshots, teams, clones. But as hobby user at home you dont need this function, so player is a good choice.
For VirtualBox are Guest Addittions available. KDE Effects dont work at the moment. Gnome 3 and Compiz in Linux Guests works. For Windows Guests Aero does not work at the moment. But a WDDM driver is announced for future versions.
KVM/Qemu is not a good choice for desktop emulation, there are no special drivers.