On Thu, 2006-09-14 at 00:15 +0100, Mark Ridley wrote:
I'm thinking exactly the same thing. A slimline install of absolutely anything, but nice and secure, with a feature rich virtual Windows install... just kidding! :)
Although to some degree you could just put a skeleton OS on as the Host just to support the Virtual machines and then run your primary OS as a guest alongside any other guests you require. There are some problems with doing this.
Overall VMware's performance is perhaps 75% of the native machines performance (assuming one guest running..Server is supposed to cope better than workstation with multiple guests) Most of the performance differences are I/O bound because you are going through extra layers of abstraction. Later VT releases may help some of this.
You don't have full access to all your hardware from the VM guests. So hardware accelerated 3D is a no-no..Some I/O devices are a problem (USB1 speeds only, some bi-directional parallel devices are a pain, CD/DVD burning is not possible AFAIK) Device sharing between guests can be a problem as well.
The guest OS's suffer media performance problems (I think these are even more of a problem on the VMware Server edition) certainly Sound and anything using Direct Video Rendering can be both latent and choppy on the Workstation version I use.