[NBLUG/talk] free virtual server

[A.C.]

The first question is whether or not your processor has VT-X or AMD-V 
extensions (see  the Hardware Support section of 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization_Technology for more 
information).  You can find a list of processors with this support at 
http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/HVM_Compatible_Processors.

There are a handful of solutions:

QEMU / KQEMU / KVM (now part of 6.20 kernel): Unaccelerated / 
Accelerated / Hardware accelerated with VT-x / AMD-V proc extensions 
respectively.  My experience is that even KVM is still very slow with a 
64-bit host and a 32-bit Windows guest (tested on Kubuntu 7.04 x64 on a 
core duo with 4 GB of RAM, even).  KVM appears to be free / Free at this 
point now that the accelerated portion has gone open source.

Xen: Not part of the kernel and requires migrating your current Linux 
install to dom0.  Requires a proc that uses VT-x or AMD-V to install 
Windows as a guest.   Near native, but may be tricky to install.  I have 
not yet tried it; anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that it works 
well enough, but may not be as easy to configure on 64-bit 
distributions.  Xen still appears to be free / Free at this point.

VMWare:  This solution is free but not Free.  It is stable and backed by 
VMWare but at the same time don't expect a lot of support for the free 
server or player versions.  Performance may vary when mixing 64-bit 
hosts and 32-bit guests, especially if you do not have a processor that 
does not have VT-x or AMD-V extensions.

I'm continuing to play around with different solutions and I haven't 
actually settled on one yet, so I'll post back once I finally make a 
decision.  At the moment I'm still using VMWare on my 32-bit install, 
and I think my next step is getting a seamless desktop set up (think 
coherence from Parallels; check out 
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SeamlessVirtualization).

Good luck,

A.C.
******

Jack Smith wrote:
> I'm sure that this has been covered many times, but what is out there 
> for free (or cheap) that will let me run a Windows partition on my 
> Linux box.  I'm running 64-bit core 5, if it matters.
> Thanks,
> Jack
>
> -- 
> English doesn't borrow from other languages -- English follows other 
> languages down dark alleys and takes what it wants.
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