On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 7:34 PM, admin <mick at 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