[ltp] Xen or VMWare

[Andrew J. Barr]

On Thu, 2006-12-21 at 11:00 -0500, Ron Joffe wrote:
> On Wednesday 20 December 2006 12:59, David Abrahams wrote:
> > If anyone has experience to share here, it would be very welcome.
> 
> David,
> 
> One thing to note with Winders. When you start up winders in either the vm or 
> natively, it needs to have the proper drivers in place for its environment. 
> The native thinkpad environment is VERY different from a vm environment. 
> Think of all of the different drivers from disk to video to network, sound, 
> etc,etc,etc.
> 
> If you were to configure Winders in the VM (even running off of a native disk 
> partition), windows will need to load all of the drivers for that vm 
> environment.
> 
> If then you wanted to do a native boot of that same partition, it would almost 
> be useless until you were able to get all of the proper drivers installed. 
> After install, going back to the vm environment would again require driver 
> install.
> 
> I did this scenario once on my thinkpad, and I will never try it again, it was 
> very painful and time consuming. 

There is a document on the VMware web site that documents how to set up
hardware profiles for Winodws so that booting in two different
environments (real peripherals and emulated ones) is relatively
painless. This same procedure should work for QEMU/KVM with little to no
tweaking.

FWIW, hardware profiles were removed from Windows Vista. One more reason
to avoid it.

/Andrew

> Just my 2 Cents,
> 
> Ron
> 
>