Gday Guys, i have a Dell D630 Laptop Centrino 2.2Ghz 2Gb Ram, 320Gb Sata 7200Rpm, DVD Burner, Nvidia Quadro NVS135M Graphics. i want to run a couple of virtual machines off this just for study purposes, i want to run a couple windows xp / 7 machines and citrix / server 2008 i installed Windows 7 and installed Vmware but im having troubles installing Citrix virtual machine. is there a better operating system to use, IE dedicated Virtual Machine OS, dont care if its linux base windows base or what ever, would prefere to have GFX interface so i dont need to VNC into the laptop i wanna be able to use it on the go and make quick modifications just by switching window. but if i have to run VNC then i will I hope u guys can help me with this, Cheers
Virtualbox runs much better than VMWare on the frontend and works nicely under Linux or Windows, but USB connectivity definitely works better under the Linux version. Pending you have the resources, Virtualbox will happily run up to 1060 or so VM's. Unfortunately I've never used Citrix in a VM, so can't give you any feedback there.
I use ESXi 4.1 as my virtualisation platform, but I'm not sure how well your laptops hardware is supported. I have never installed a Citrix server as a VM.
For my work/study laptop I use Ubuntu and KVM with LVM for storage. Pretty simple stuff and gives you all the benefits of the enterprise virtulisation products on a easy to use desktop. virt-manager can be used as a GUI interface. Works for me, may work for you.
Running Ubuntu with KVM and virt-manager on my laptop, and home server. If I run Windows, I start the VM headless and RDP into it. My wife runs Ubuntu on her laptop, with WinXP inside of VirtualBox for her work (MYOB is a heavy requirement). She access the VM directly through the graphical console. My advice for people wanting fast console access to VMs on any OS is to go with Virtualbox for now. Until RedHat finalise their "SPICE" protocol, the SDL and VNC based systems in KVM/virt-manager are quite slow and clunky. Once SPICE is done, then KVM will really be great for GUI/console-based desktop emulation. My advice is to avoid VMWare at all costs. It's slow (for both CPU and I/O), has a horrendous laundry list of bugs (which seem to get longer with every release), and is rapidly being commoditised out of the market by everyone else. I consider them the "Netscape of virtualisation".
