[lug] Linux | VMware | Xen question..

[Jeff]

On Fri, 3 Mar 2006, Michael Belanger wrote:
> On Friday 03 March 2006 17:36, Hugh Brown wrote:
>
> > I'm not entirely clear on how you'd do native windows and a vm windows
> > w/o essentially having two windows installations.  Granted I'm not a
> > vmware expert, but in my experience thus far, when you create a vm in
> > vmware it corresponds to a single file on the filesystem.  I really
> > doubt you could go back and

Hi,

I've been using this scenario since VMWare Workstation was originally
released.  I have Win2k installed on one small physical partition
and linux on the rest of the drive (my primary OS).  I can select
either windows or linux with lilo when I turn on the computer.  The
boot loader shouldn't matter based on how VMWare treats the hard drive.

If I boot Linux, I can then boot the same Win2k image off the physical
partition via VMWare.  The only difference (which was mentioned) is
you need to create a second hardware profile in windows first.  When
you boot Windoze via VMWare for the first time, select the new
hardware profile and plug and play will initiate.  AFAICR, just
select the defaults and std VGA for the video.  After it comes up,
you'll need to install the included VMWare drivers (it mounts as a
virtual disk -- see the help).

Ironically, I've found more often than not that Windows is more stable
through VMWare than natively.

So you can run a client OS under VMWare via two scenarios:  As a
disk image file or from a raw partition.  There are instructions
on VMWare's website on how to do either.  There are also different
network options where you can choose to run NAT, mount your linux
partitions via Samba, and lots of other features.  Again, VMWare's
website has a lot of great docs.

Hope this helps!

-Jeff