[CentOS] virtualization on the desktop a myth, or a reality?

Thu Mar 3 23:55:56 UTC 2011
Dr. Ed Morbius <dredmorbius at gmail.com>

on 16:44 Thu 03 Mar, Lamar Owen (lowen at pari.edu) wrote:
> On Thursday, March 03, 2011 04:24:14 pm Dr. Ed Morbius wrote:
> > I think I addressed that reality.  
> 
> Part of it, yes.
> 
> > For some needs, you need to be on
> > bare metal, though whether this is accomplished via multi-booting or
> > multiple systems (if you're doing professional music editing, presumably
> > you can justify a dedicated system to that task).
> 
> It's not the computer portion of a separate dedicated system that
> would be expensive; it's the audio interfaces, patching, and control
> surfaces.  Much much much easier to dual-boot in a workflow-friendly
> fashion.  It would be decidedly nice to have virtualization running
> well enough to handle all the needs; but it requires twice the
> capacity machine to do it. 

I thought a bit about that when posting earlier.  I still disagree WRT
dual-booting.  And no, virtualization doesn't need twice the hardware by
a long shot (aggregated load averaging, shared componentry, and a host
of other savings).

Audio's pretty easy, as you could select between sources and output (or
input) accordingly.

Ditto inputs (keyboard, mouse, etc.).  Storage might be
virtualized/aggregated somehow.

For video, you want high-performance.  I'm thinking an integrated KVM
might work, or something like it.  If done in hardware with digital
inputs it should be pretty good.  How you'd split / select displays
would be a design question.
 
-- 
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