[lug] Linux | VMware | Xen question..

[John Karns]

On Mon, 6 Mar 2006, Ken MacFerrin wrote:

> Thanks to all for the responses.  I'm just about done compiling and tweaking 
> the new Gentoo install so I should be able to find time to load up VMware & 
> WinXP this week.  I'm going to try putting Win on a secondary disk and using 
> the multiple hardware profiles approach to support both VMware and native 
> access to XP Pro.  For curious Gentoo users, there's an experimental ebuild 
> for VMware Server (the new, free replacement to VMware GSX Server) located 
> here:
> http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=122500

I've had success in configuring VMWare to run W98 / W2k that had been
initially been installed via normal windows install - VMWare refers to it
as configuring for "raw disk" mode.  IIRC, that was using VMWare version
2.x, although could have been 3.x.  In any case, they changed their
virtual device handling scheme in the subsequent release, and mentioned in
the docs that the probability running a vm in raw disk mode had been
significantly impacted.  I was unable to get the windows installation to
run in that mode.

Secondly, I could be wrong, but don't MS's built-in limitations for
changes in hardware in XP prevent one from running the system under two
different hardware environments, as was possible with pre-XP versions?
I would expect at a minimum, to be confronted with having to request
another install key from MS during the 1st boot.

-- 
John Karns