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Recommendations For Home Virtualization?
An anonymous reader writes "I'll have to upgrade my home computers sometime in the next few months and I'm thinking it's time to swallow the virtualization pill. Besides the ease of switching between Windows and Ubuntu, I'm looking mainly for the ability to save machine state in order to be able to revert to a known working state. Googling turns up mostly guides from 2009 and earlier. Is VMWare ESX pretty much the way to go? Performance does matter — not for gaming but I am heavily into photography, so apps like Lightroom and Photoshop need to run well. Thanks for any insight."
Frankly, RedHat isn't Linux. They have never been, and they wont ever. RedHat is dumping Xen, ok ... But even if IBM (and a bit of RedHat) is working on KVM, so is Intel, Oracle, Samsung, Fujitsu and others working on Xen.
KVM is in mainline kernel? Well, so is domU support. And dom0 in mainline kernel support is slowly becoming a reality as well. Patches after patches, it's upstreaming.
RedHat is dumping Xen? Well, how long is this going to be sustainable when it's going to be directly available as an option to tick in your "make menuconfig"? Will they be so stupid as to REFUSE to integrate RPMs with the userland tools and hypervisor? What's going to say Oracle about this, when they recommend (and even ship) Oracle virtual machines?
Please stop cut/pasting things about RedHat dumping Xen, WE DON'T CARE ABOUT REDHAT (MISS-)COMMUNICATION !!!
1) You didn't even vaguely respond to my question.
2) Why should I give up PC games just because you think it's better to run Linux as the host? I like PC games, and I consider the risk of viruses to be no greater with a Windows host than a Linux host.
Windows 7 is more than good enough as the host machine, and I have far more need of graphics performance in Windows than in Linux. As long as I don't do anything stupid, I'm not in any more danger of getting a virus than I would be running a Linux host.
If I were working in a government lab with secret projects and whatnot, maybe I'd do as you suggest. But at home, where I just want to play games and tinker with C++ projects in Linux, I see absolutely no reason to be that paranoid.
Then don't use Windows as the host OS -- it belongs in a padded cell that virtualization provides.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.