[Discuss] I need some dual-booting advice

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 11:44 AM, Rich Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have a couple of workstations I need to get set up. The owner wants to
> have both Windows and RHEL6 on them. Either dual-boot or running Windows
> in a virtual machine on Linux hosts is acceptable to the owner. Both
> operating systems need to be available to multiple users on the console
> (not simultaneously) and if Windows is virtualized then automatic USB
> pass through from the console is required.
>
> These last two have me stumped for the best way to get these set up. My
> first attempt was with KVM but USB pass through is a manual process that
> has to be performed by an administrator for each device. This is not
> viable. My second attempt was with a VMware workstation shared virtual
> machine which I discovered the hard way doesn't do USB pass through at all.
>
> Is there some virtalization trick that I'm missing, something that will
> do a shared virtual machine with automatic USB pass through or is
> dual-booting the only way to get this working?

At one time, I used VirtualBox's USB guest access to allow the Windows software
from TomTom to update my GPS.   This was a number of years ago and I haven't
used it since then.   As I recall, it was possible to specify
particular USB ids which
were "captured" by a virtual machine so that the host OS (some version
of Ubuntu at the time)
didn't try to use them.  It did work, but my memory is that it was
quite slow.   This was probably
3 or 4 years ago and it is likely that things have changed (improved?)
since then.   I
don't recall if there was a way to have all USB devices passed through
to a VM so this may or may
not satisfy your use case.

Bill Bogstad