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Deciding between virtual machine or dual-boot setup

rated 0 times [ 17] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 81761 / 2 Years ago, mon, february 28, 2022, 5:43:32

I would like to set-up a PC to run ubuntu most of the time, but also need to run XP for specific applications and testing. In the past I would have simply set up a dual boot machine and then restart and boot into windows XP as needed.

However since the machine has multiple cores and significant memory, I think I can use Virtual Box, Xen, or VMWare hypervisors. I am thinking of making Ubuntu the "host" VM and having XP as a guest VM. This would be especially nice for testing/debug/development since it is possible to run applications in both OS's simultaneously. I've never setup a virtual machine before and think that by asking the questions below I can avoid some trial-and-error.

Basically, I need to decide if a dual boot or VM setup is more appropriate for what I want to do.

Here's my questions:

I do not always need to have XP running. Do the hypervisors allow me to shut the guest VM down so that the host VM can then immediately use all memory and processor resources? When I then bring up the guest VM, is it easy to provision how much memory and other resources are used by it? Ideally, I'd like to pre-configure this in advance and then toggle the guest VM off/on without thinking about it.

Is it possible or advisable to have the host OS be 64bit and the guest OS be 32bit? Alternatively, if both VM's are 32 bit and I have 8G of RAM, can the hypervisor provision each VM with 4G of RAM when they are running simultaneously?

Which hypervisors are best for set-ups such as I described?

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1 Year ago

answered 2 Years ago egantfis · Accepted Answer

From my experience it is a good idea to run a less often used OS in a virtual machine. This avoids reboots and enables easy data exchange between both worlds. As a rule of thumb we should have the OS we work most with as the host OS to run the guest OS we don't use that often.

From my side I can only speak for Virtual Box, as I have very little experience with other solutions. However, Virtual Box is stable, free and available across platforms. I do recommend it.

Drawbacks and advantages of a virtual machine are summarized in this answer, so I will not repeat them here.

Just one thing in addition: if you develop software you may find it quite nice to have the bug going wild in a virtual machine only.

To answer your quesitons:

Yes, you can just shut down the guest OS to have all ressources back to the host. You can even save a machines state to continue your work after waking it up again.

The architecture does not really matter. I run both 64-bit machines, and 32-bit machines on my 64-bit host. They feel the same. If your processor offers virtualization (it very likely does) you can even run 64-bit guests on a 32-bit host.

That depends on very specific needs where one or the other solution may be better at the moment be - we can't really give a recommendation for all aspects. Such things will also likely change over time.

Try it out, it is not that complicated, and support for Virtual Box is excellent.

Here is an example of memory usage from Virtual Box machines:

enter image description here

Left side is

Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit on a dual core AMD CPU, 2 users logged in with 2.3 GiB memory usage by various applications.

One Windows XP 32-bit 4 GiB RAM running.

A second Windows XP 32-bit 1 GiB RAM running.

The 1 GiB VM is sent to shut down at position 1, the 4 GiB VM sent to shut down at position 2.

Further increasing the memory sizes of the VMs led to extensive usage of swap that made the system almost unresponsive. Running 2 VMs with 4 GiB each was not allowed on my system here (8 GiB). One of the machines was then shut down from Virtual Box manager.