[BozemanLUG] Question..

[David Boreham]

Mike Stone wrote:
> I'm not sure what I want even exists, but what I'm looking for is 
> something that is as low level as ESXi, but with no real interface 
> software.  The vision in my head is just a key combination to switch 
> seemlessly between multiple guest OSs.
I don't think this exists.

You're talking about something like Hyper-V for the desktop, with 
features like GPU virtualization.
It's an open question for me as to whether the market needs such a thing.
I think you can achieve your goals with VMWare, even the free version. 
The economics don't work
for an 'efficient' host OS (ESX wasn't developed to allow the use of 
cheaper/older/slower hardware but rather to
allow better host resource sharing between guests than could be achieved 
with a commercial host OS).
By definition, anyone running multiple guests on a machine is going to 
need a beefy box regardless
of what kind of host OS they use. New machines are quite cheap, and it's 
very hard to justify
developing a new software product solely because it will help people who 
don't want to buy a
faster machine. Typically such a product would not be finished before 
the target machines
were long since junked.

FWIW what we do here is to run a couple of big 64-bit servers (running 
CentOS) as VMWware hosts.
We make VMs for all the various OS'es we need to use and run them on 
those boxen. Two servers
allows us to move VMs between the machines in order to upgrade the host 
OS, re-install, add hardware etc,
without major downtime for the VMs. Also if one machine fails we have a 
backup image of all the VMs it
was hosting, on the other machine.

I do run some VMs on my desktop and laptop machines (using VMWare hosted 
by Windows) but it's a major
pain and I avoid it when I can. There are too many hassles with 
sleep/resume breaking the VM, USB devices
magically vanishing, and just not enough memory to usefully host more 
than one or two guests.

I suppose it might be cost effective to use EC2 instead of buying a 
bigger machine.