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I am trying to find a solution where I can do the following:

1) Run a small footprint on my laptop 2) Run virtual instances of OS w/ no primary OS installed. All the OS that I will ever use will be all virtualized.

I tried playing around with the VMware Esxi, and got it to boot it from the flash drive, etc. But this just runs the server. I cannot actually run my virtual instances from there. Anyone has done this? Something similar implemented with VMWare products without needing 2 computers will be great.

Thanks, -Subhash

sqlbuzz
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  • See - http://serverfault.com/questions/201427/running-2-virtual-hosts-side-by-side-interactively-no-guests-just-hosts/201443#201443 . There's no cheap way to do this today without a relatively large footprint boot OS. – Helvick Nov 29 '10 at 20:24

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try proxmox from a USB drive -

Glenn Kelley
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1) Run a small footprint on my laptop 2) Run virtual instances of OS w/ no primary OS installed. All the OS that I will ever use will be all virtualized.

Helvick's comment on your original question contains a link to another question discussing the merits of doing so.

Furthermore, what exactly would you gain from this? It sounds to me like all you want is a low resource hypervisor. If you're really motivated to do so, I highly recommend Xen (there are also several products which build on top of it). This would allow you run a very low footprint server (i.e., a headless, barebones Debian install), which would free up most of the resources for your guest VMs.

Keep in mind, what you're trying to do is fairly advanced and will require you to have some Linux command line knowledge.

If you could illustrate how you came to conclude that you need something so low level, perhaps we could help you more. But because this is running on your laptop and not a server, looking into a hypervisor--or even dual-booting--might be more appropriate.

Hope this points you in the right direction!

Andrew M.
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  • Thank you. The reason I am trying to do this is because: – sqlbuzz Nov 29 '10 at 21:49
  • Thank you. The reason I am trying to do this is because I do not have a lot of testing environments with different OS on server level because of resources. Even Win XP virtual machine does not run as expected even when running from a cleanly installed Windows 7 host. I will look into the Xen's Debian way you outlined. I do have experience in the Linux world. Is there any alternative suggestion? – sqlbuzz Nov 29 '10 at 21:55
  • In that case, you may just want to run this as a virtual machine. Have you looked into something like Virtualbox for a free solution? – Andrew M. Nov 29 '10 at 23:45
  • If you have the resources, you can also run VMView (http://www.vmware.com/products/view/) (formally VDI) which has a relatively low footprint and will "create a seamless desktop experience". – Fergus Dec 14 '10 at 05:36