On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 7:34 PM, admin mick@mjhall.org wrote:
Yes, this seems like a case where virtualisation is a good solution. I've only just started learning to run Xen myself, but the advantages of virtualisation over dual/triple booting etc are pretty clear. As well as the ones you mention, different machines can also be run concurrently and networked.
I have recently put virtualized xen CentOS host and guests into production, using the standard tools in CentOS 5 and all works well. Not sure about the VMServer since I haven't tried it, but with xen built into the kernel and what I've seen of the tools such as virt-manager, virt-clone, virt-image, it is very light and simple and should work well for the needs described.
In in this case, I'd suggest formatting the whole disk, with a very large partition to hold xen image files, files that represent the hard-drives of the guests. While disk io in the guests is a bit slower, the flexibility should be worth it, as imaging a guest is no more difficult than a file copy. The guests can access the host's storage via NFS or Samba just as an networked host can.
Brett