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Recommendations For Home Virtualization?

Posted by kdawson on from the ganging-up dept.

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."

4 of 384 comments (clear)

  1. Give VirtualBox a try! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    http://www.virtualbox.org/

  2. VitrtuaBox by mattver2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I have used VirtualBox quite a bit and I find it completely satisfactory. I have run both Win XP on Ubuntu hosts and Ubunutu on Win XP hosts and it has always worked very well. http://www.virtualbox.org/ I think it would do everything you want.

  3. Don't do it by timeOday · · Score: 5, Insightful
    You won't be happy scrolling around a big image within a VM - the graphics performance just isn't there. It will work OK, but you'll always wish you were running natively.

    I use VMWare Workstation for much of each day to run MS Office Apps, and it's very useful - but no VM performs well graphically.

  4. Desktop virtualization? by hjf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You mean desktop virtualization? Do you need to run 2+ OSes at the same time? That's what virtualization is for. Or do you need to just suspend and restore states? You can get away with hibernation for that. Or do you mean go back in time to a known working configuration? Windows can do that (System Restore), but I don't really see why you would need that on your main machine. If you're trying stuff out, you should try it inside the VM anyway (you use Workstation or VirtualBox for that).

    ESX is nice, but it's not what you think. You don't get a local console (last time I checked, anyway), you're supposed to access it from SSH or VNC. It also designed for datacenter stuff (like SAS disks and controllers. It doesn't support IDE for example). You're looking for VMWare Workstation (Paid) or VirtualBox (free for non-commercial use), which are pretty fast. Paravirtualization (ESX or XEN) will give ~98% speed on Linux (on a PV kernel) and Windows only works well if you use GPLPV drivers, otherwise is slow as hell.

    I'd just recommemd you stay away from virtualization if you're just a desktop user. Unless you're trying out shareware/malware/stuff that can break your install. If you're upgrading, why not use the old machine to try ESX, XEN and other stuff and figure out yourself how you want to use it? Stick to dual-boot for now.