What I've done in the past is simply Dual boot, but I would like to not have to reboot my computer in order to switch OS's. Specifically, what I'd like is:
Computer would mainly run Linux,
When I want to play a Windows only game I can switch over to Windows, for that period of time then return to Linux.
Both Linux and Windows need to run up to native in speed.
I'm looking for suggestions in setting this up.
I've looked into Xen, however, I hear that Xen doesn't support 3D graphics? is this accurate. I've also looked into WineD3D and VMGL. However, Wine won't play every game, so I'd still need the Windows VM, and VMGL doesn't seem to work universally either.
I'm running two different machines that I plan to put this setup on:
Laptop:
Intel i7 4720HQ
16GB Ram
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 965M
Desktop:
AMD FX-8350
16GB Ram
EVGA GeForce GTX 960
I just joined and the "Tour" said, don't ask questions that could lead to a discussion than an answer. Anyway, If gaming is your primary goal, have windows as primary boot & dive into linux as VM. Otherwise you need to find a hyper-visor that provides 3D services or pass-through to your actual GPU.
There is a discussion here
I am not sure if amazon simply does not offer graphics for linux vm instances or if its to do with configuration. But i recently setup a linux node on ec2 and i tried to setup rdp. I kept getting a blank screen but after much trial and error, went with bizspark and setup a linux node and to my surprise I see the bizspark linux node comes with a vga graphics card! while the amazon one does not!
Without a vga graphics card or builtin chipset its not possible to rdp in the linux node.
So does amazon offer graphics card on linux vms or is it a simply a matter of configuration ?
edit:
It is possible to have rdp even without a graphic card apparently. What I found out is one can install X2GO server on their ubuntu server and then just get the x2go client. No need for rdp.
If you'd like to get RDP working on EC2, take a look here:
http://michaelhallsmoore.com/blog/Desktop-Ubuntu-in-Amazon-EC2-The-Right-Way
or
http://activeintelligence.org/blog/archive/remote-graphical-linux-desktop-on-ec2/
You don't actually need a video card.
I am thinking about running some graphics intensive programs on Windows Azure virtual machine, but not sure what kind of hardware do they have. Does all the VM have the same GPU? What is your experience of it?
The GPUs in Azure Virtual Machine are likely to be very basic and will most probably not have anywhere near the processing power you will need for carrying out intensive graphics manipulation. To my knowledge MS don't publish the details of the graphics hardware behind their Virtual Machines (If they actually use them at all?).
There's a question here on running WPF in an Azure cloud service which may be helpful.
Can Azure run WPF?
The N series Azure VMs support beefy GPUs. The NC series VM sports Tesla K80, with DDA (discreet device assignment) it supposed to provide close to bare metal performance. NV series VMs offer Tesla M60 with nVidia GRID.
More:
https://www.hpcwire.com/2015/09/29/microsoft-puts-gpu-boosters-on-azure-cloud/
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/hybridcloudbp/2016/12/13/n-series-azure-vms-with-gpu/
It's fascinating that there are FPGAs in Azure machines too (although not publicly accessible):
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-catapult/
Have 4 DVI output. Seems I hopefully will have driver support on this. Details are sketchy online about supporting 4 outputs, but seems possible.
My question is from the Linux group and Virtualbox pros.... Will the seamless method of VirtualBox allow me to use all 3 of my monitors for multiscreen. I'd like to stick with Ubuntu and run Visual C# and other tools from my VirtualBox. Compiz effects are just too amazing to want Aero Glass.
What do you think, will my system be able to use the multiple monitors with VirtualBox and this graphics card? I've googled for hours and am still searching for answers.
Edit:
I tried virtualbox last night. Pretty slick, though I had an error in installing Visual C#NET. However, it wouldn't let you drag between multiple screens??? Is this something the host must resolve, or does the guest session need to have special settings for multiple monitors? Haven't been able to find anything in google supporting multiple monitors with virtualbox.
You should be able to configure your screens just fine. Don't know the exact details for an ATI setup, but you should be able to use Xinerama to create a single large virtual desktop, and then just run VirtualBox (though honestly, I prefer KVM, which runs on modern CPUs which provide native virtualization support) full-screen on one of those monitors. You would then be able to have three screens dedicated to Ubuntu, and the forth dedicated to Windows.
You might want to look into the non-Xinerama method of multiple displays. Each display is then treated as its own screen (so you'd have :0.0, :0.1, :0.2, and :0.3 for your X displays). You cannot move applications between the screens, but you get four independent desktops. I personally find that more useful than the idea of a single stretched desktop over multiple displays; when I used a laptop as my primary system, that's what I did, and when I get a second monitor for my computer, I'll likely return to that means of doing things. You'll have to investigate the specifics for such a setup with ATI, but the X server supports it, so it's just a matter of looking at your ATI driver's documentation to put the pieces together.
We have a physical machine that runs VMware and hosts a VM we use for SharePoint deployment testing. That machine is old and dying, and my employer's network czars are heavily pushing hosted VMs as a replacement for outdated physical servers. I was curious about whether it's possible to run VMware inside VMware, and if so, whether there are severe performance implications. We don't require extreme performance from this setup, since it's just used for SharePoint testing and the associated SQL Server is on a different box. My guess is that we can't just use the primary hosted VM for our testing because we'll want to roll back occasionally and otherwise have more control over it, and getting buy-in for that from the network folks is unlikely. Does anyone have any experience with this?
edit: I know this nesting certainly isn't the preferred option, but (1) we want the flexibility of being able to use VMware snapshots at will and (2) the network folks will not allow us to arbitrarily roll back to a previous point in time because of the potential for removing mandated security updates. My guess is that a local desktop machine running VMware Workstation might just be the way to go. The hosted option seems attractive if it will work though since it's less machine maintenance for me to deal with.
The technical limitation with running VMware inside VMware is that VMware, Virtual PC, etc takes advantage of the Virtualization features present in modern CPUs.
If you have two or more hypervisors are both trying to control Ring 0 then there will be problems, this is something that I've encountered while trying to run both VMware and Virtual PC simultaneously on my desktop - one will error out/crash.
If your hypervisor can interact with the 'parent' hypervisor, then you'll be OK. Alternatively if the child hypervisor doesn't try to use the CPU virtualization features, or entirely emulates the CPU (such as QEMU) then you should also be OK.
Basically old-style hypervisors on old CPUs use Full virtualization (slow) which would be capable of nesting with a heavy, heavy performance hit. modern Hypervisors/CPUs use hardware assisted virtualization (near native performance) and you'd be hard pressed to find a hypervisor that is designed or capable of nested virtual machines.
Finally, I'd really advise against running dev/test VMs on the same physical server that is running production VMs. There's just too much to go wrong and security implications - you need to manage the dev/test environment and it sounds like you shouldn't have access to production environment. Likewise you probably don't want the operations team messing about with your test environment.
UPDATE: ESXi 4 now supports virtualizing itself. See this article for more information
I've never run VMware in VMware, but I've run VirtualPC inside VirtualBox without problems, so there's no fundamental reason it shouldn't work I suppose...
It sounds to me more like you have a problem with the inflexibility of your "network czars" than any technical one. If you're a developer or QA you need a testing environment where you can fool around with outdated (and potentially insecure) versions of the OS and applications, without putting the rest of the company network at risk.
Ex-VMware employee here.
Firstly, when you say Nested VMware I will assume you mean Nested ESXi. (You could also mean Workstation, Fusion, or Player).
Nested ESXi environments are unsupported and should not be used for production. These scenarios are not tested in QA and not guaranteed to work. In short, if you experience any kind of problem, VMware will not help you with this Nested ESXi setup.
With that said, yes you can do it and yes it does work. A lot of people use nested ESXi in their labs but not in production. Previously there were special configuration file edits that were necessary for nested ESXi to work. I have seen environments with even 3 layer nested ESXi servers (ESXi vm on and ESXi vm on a physical ESXi host). More recently there is the ESXi appliance which makes this much easier.
Have a look here:
http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2015/12/deploying-nested-esxi-is-even-easier-now-with-the-esxi-virtual-appliance.html
I ran into this same problem. I work at a large company where our entire infrastructure is virtual, so if you need a server you get a VMware VM. So I had a couple of Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition based Guest VM's that had 6GB of memory and 200 GB of disk space, but I wanted to run linux and a LAMP stack on them. So I tried to install VMware Workstation on one and I got an error message saying it couldn't be installed within a VM. I also tried Microsoft Virtual PC and got a similar error message. I installed Sun's VirtualBox and that installed fine, but I couldn't get the networking to work w/in the guest Ubuntu OS. My next step is to try QEMU although performance might become an issue.
You ought to have a look at Mainframes - they are Virtualised from the word go:
Hardware - runs Hypervisor Type 1 - Level 1
on this you have zVM - Type 2 Hypervisor - Level 2
on this you have zOS - your main big operating system - Level 3
and/or
on this you have zLinux - Level 3
and/or
on this you have zVM for testing next version - Level 3
and/
on this you have zOS for testing zVM plus zOS both at next version - Level 4
So going down to level 4 is pretty common
Mind you on a Mainframe you can have 1000's of VMs running at the same time - and most sites who start using zVM/CMS and zVM/Linux usually do.
I can see two solutions for this (three if you count a VM inside a VM which is just crazy).
New hardware, which should be robust enough to handle several VM's used specifically for testing (sharpoint, etc.). In this situation your team could be given more rights without affecting non-testing VM's.
Sharepoint test VM's are moved to the main VM pool and those who need access are given the ability to checkout/deploy/rollback testing resources. This could be direct through VMWare tools or through an internal project that works through a VMWare API.
This should be a joint decision between Network/Dev/Testing.
JFYI:
I tried installing and running VMware ESXi server host(child ESXi server) as a virtual machine(on parent ESXi server) and it runs however you can not run any VMs under child ESXi server.
I am doing practice of VMware vSphere Data center virtualization on single Physical machine. There is VMware Workstation installed on Windows 8 OS. In VM Workstation, I have installed Windows Server 2008 OS, VMware ESXi OS and created the VMware Data center LAB. There is VMs running in LAB, and its confirm that We can user VMware in VMware. But it depends on your need, and Products which is chosen.
You can install ESXi on VMware Workstation, it's usefull to learn ESXi, so there in no reason run VMware in VMware.
Yes. You can run VMWare inside VMWare. Though its not officially supported, You can deploy VMs in the child ESX. I have checked for an advanced feature like PassThrough the HBA card but which was not available in child ESX, hence I could not provide a LUN from array.
So in production its better to not use this.
But for training and practices this can be used.
You can do that.
You can install vmware esxi inside virtual machine of another vmware esxi.
But the performance will be very bad.
Totally works.. totally can't do it other then for some kinda testing or some kind of educational purpose, because you won't get support. and from my limited experience it doesn't perform that well.
Yes, you can, VMware can even detect if it's running inside of another vmware machine and warn you that VMception will cause worse performance. which it will, trust me, just try to get the version the virtual machines work best in a physical machine, as to get as much performance possible.
"whether it's possible to run VMware inside VMware" What?
I can run Windows with Sharepoint in a VMWare machine that's hosted somewhere.
Or, I can run Windows with Sharepoint in a WMWare machine that's actually a VMWare machine that's hosted somewhere.
Why on earth would I add a level of nesting? Why not just go with Windows with Sharepoint hosted somewhere?
You can have any number of VMWares running on a single host. Lots of different versions doing lots of different things.
Nesting them doesn't make sense.