[Discuss] Using raw host hard disk in virtual client

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On 08/04/2012 11:33 AM, Jerry Natowitz wrote:
> I share a computer with my wife. She sticks to Windows 7, I generally
> use Linux.  There are a lot of partitions on the systems, NTFS, VFAT,
> and ext4.  I would like to have a virtual Linux client running on W7
> that I can either ssh to, or ftp mount partitions from a laptop.
>
> I've used VirtualBox at work to run both Linux clients on Windows XP,
> or vice versa.  Windows client on Linux works well, but the Linux
> client on Windows is very slow.  Both use file based virtual disks.  I
> looked into native disk partition support, but got the impression that
> it is not stable enough to use in a production/home environment.
>
> At best, one could copy a disk or partitions of a disk into a virtual
> disk to use on the guest.
>
> I used VMware a long time ago, but never used Xen.  Any advise on how
> to proceed?
I am using a VMWare VM (from an ESX box) at work and I see very good
performance. Better than the physical machine it replaced. I also like
VirtualBox, and we have a project at work that uses VirtualBox.
Remember that VirtualBox requires hardware virtualization if you want to
use a 64-bit guest. On Linux, I would also recommend KVM (again make
sure virtualization is turned on in the BIOS). I suspect when you
virtualized under Windows you possibly had a 32-bit Windows and did not
have virtualization turned on. Both KVM and Virtualbox are easy to use,
both support mouse integration and shares so you can share data. In our
project, I have the VMs on a USB drive.

I would recommend using Linux as your host OS, mainly because you have a
better file system, and your shares can be native to Linux. But, some
people who have Windows 7 (64-bit) should get decent performance from
VirtualBox. Our project is on my Lenovo T430 with an Intel I5 performs
well and allows me to turn on Virtualization where many laptops do not.

One thing you can do with the Linux host OS is to turn off many
services, and rely on your guest. But, you can tune it any way you want.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
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