Virtualization recommendation

[Aharon Schkolnik]

On Tuesday 15 September 2009, David Suna wrote:
> I just bought a new Gateway laptop that comes with Windows Vista (and a
> free upgrade to Windows 7).  I want to be able to run both Linux (Ubuntu
> is my preferred distribution) and Windows (Vista for now, Windows 7 in
> the future) using virtualization.  I have not gotten into virtualization
> until now so I wanted recommendations about how to go about doing this.


Does anyone have up-to-date information regarding the possibility of using 
the existing installed Vista partition as a a VMWare (or similiar) client 
under Linux ? What I mean is - leave the existing Vista installation alone, 
install Linux on a separate partition (creating a multi-boot 
configuration), configure VMWare to use the Vista partition as a client.  I 
have done this sort of thing in the past with older versions of Windows, 
but haven't done it recently. I like this setup because if something 
doesn't work under the Windows virtual machine, you can boot into Windows 
and check it out there. One of the reasons I haven't used this setup 
recently is because I have SCSI disks, and VMWare has a problem using the 
Windows partition as a client when the Windows partition is on a SCSI disk. 
I am very interested to know if anyone has information that could help me. 
At the moment, if I need to run something under  Windows, I have to reboot 
:-(.




>
> >From what I have read so far I have the following options:
>
> 1. Host on Windows using VMWare (either VMware Player or Workstation)
>
> 2. Host on Windows using Microsoft Virtual PC
>
> 3. Host on Linux using VMWare, Xen etc but then I have to deal with
> installing Windows since the laptop comes with it but does not have
> separate installation disks
>
>
> Recommendations for or against any of the above or information about
> other options that I left out would be appreciated.
>
>
> Thanks,


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