On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 1:58 PM, Clint Billedeaux <clint@fastbadge.com> wrote:
> So we're using VirtualBox to run our XP machines on some new hardware. The
> new hardware of course is running Windows 7.
Just my thought on the matter... I tried Virtualbox extensively
once... I ran into stability problems,
not that there is something inherently wrong with the VBox technology;
I just found it to be a little
bit unreliable, even less reliable than Microsoft Hyper-V, which is
tough. I also at one point wound
up with a corrupt VM disk that could not be started, after a crash of
Virtualbox. Matters may have
improved greatly in the past year, but if the stability of your XP
install is a requirement;
generally I would recommend VMware Desktop, Parallels Desktop for
Windows & Linux, or
VMware Player for desktop applications instead of VBox, and for
server applications, A type
1 VMM, VMware Server, or a few other things over VBox.
If your hardware is VT enabled, KVM is pretty reliable, and I
would like that.
But as far as having both reliability _and_ a seamless desktop integration...
I am totally unimpressed by VBox at this point.
> My question is what version of Linux would you recommend...if we were to
> strip Windows 7 off these machines of course. It has to be stable (linux, I
> know, but there are some crappy distros out there that I'd like to avoid if
> possible) and it must NOT get in the way of some specialty printers we use.
It depends on what you are trying to do.
Is the Linux install just a lightweight shell to run a bunch of XP
virtual machines on the desktop?
Or is the Linux shell going to be _the_ desktop, with a virtual
machine for running Legacy apps?
I would look in this order: SuSE Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Redhat
Enterprise Linux/CentOS 6, Ubuntu
To have a full linux desktop.
Obviously, there are some more optimal choices to have the 'lightest
distro possible' to just run Desktop VMs.
Maybe the optimal situation in that case is to not use generic Linux at all,
but to use a "Client Hypervisor"; which is a distribution dedicated
to running virtual machines on the workstation, instead of a generic
desktop OS.
-- -JH ___________________ Nolug mailing list nolug@nolug.orgReceived on 10/22/11
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