[lug] Virtualization w/Windows host, was something else

[karl horlen]

> I lost the thread and the subject
> wasn't related hence my subject.  

that's ok, glad to pick it up here since it's sort of a separate topic

> In reply to the question about virtualization, I've had
> good luck with
> virtual box on a windows XP host and ubuntu guest.  I

good to know

> I haven't used vmware in recent months but the advantage of
> virtualbox is
> that you can take multiple snapshots.

in terms of virtualization, what do you mean by snapshots?  i understand the concept in terms of a backup but not sure how it relates to vms.

SOME OTHER GENERAL VIRT QUESTIONS

also, after looking at some online virtualization documentation, this stuff appears easier than i thought.  i originally thought you had to work a lot of magic to make an non virtual os host a virtual host os but it appears you simply 

a) download a pkg or executable (for windows) and install the sucker and fire it up

b) you create your vdisk for your guest

c) start up the guest and install to it

Q1] 

simple. are these pretty universal install and config procedures for the plethora of virtualization options that exist out there today?

Q2]

i get the impression most of these options are pretty robust these days.  after all some have been out for quite a long time.  last thing i'd want to do is setup virtualization and muck up my system.  can someone confirm the *general* robustness of these suckers today and when and if something goes wrong, what percentage usually gets borked : the host, the guest, both, etc?  is it something you can usually recover from.  i guess i'd be ok if my guest got borked but i definitely wouldn't want my host OS to get hosed.

Q3]

when you install virtualization sw on a host, if you don't start up a guest vm are you still incurring a performance penalty hit?  i'm assuming this stuff is running at the kernel level, even in scnearios where from what i can tell the guest is HW virtualization.  if there is a performance or resource hit from a vm host not running any guests, how minimal is it?  does it eat up a lot of ram and cpu cycles or is some percentage say 90% only when the guest vm starts up?  looking for generalizations / rough estimates here.

Q4]

finally, as i reacquaint myself with virtualization, can someone clarify the virtualization networking term which is used to describe the scenario where you want a guest's network interface to look like it's on the same external lan it's host is connected to?  sort of like they're peers to the corp internal lan.  is that what's known as 'bridging'?  this will help me google come network configuration time.

i think the virtualization networking scenarios and terms are what confused me with virtualization a couple of years ago.  if anybody has a link to good explanations of virtual networking terms and scenarios that'd be greatly appreciated.

thanks