Dual Boot, VM or Hypervisor

[Andrew May]

Currently using Windows on my main machine but there are now several
Linux applications that I prefer.

What do people think about the best way to get access to both OSs?
Dual-boot the machine. Run a single OS with the other in a Virtual
Machine (in which case, which one?) or go down the route that I have
never tried before and run both under a single hypervisor like Xen?

Andrew

[Theo]

You can run Windows under Xen, but it's a mild pain.

I'd suggest VMware Player, VirtualBox or Windows under KVM. Hyper-V might
be feasible too, but I haven't tried it.

It really depends what your performance constraints are: where are the
applications whose performance is important, and do they need special
hardware (eg GPU)?

Unless you need bare metal performance all the time, I'd suggest that a virt
solution is less pain than rebooting (and fixing bootloaders when Windows
messes with them, again)

I'm assuming you have a suitably modern machine with hardware virtualisation
support (VT-x or AMD-V)?

Theo

[Raj Kundra]

"Andrew May" <andrew...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:nt0fj8$rr9$1...@dont-email.me...

Dual boot.
I have been using it on one of Microserver for last few yaers and no
problem.



---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
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[TMack]

I have one of my PCs set up to boot Windows from one hard disk and Linux from another hard disk. That way
the OS partitions exist completely independent of each other. I just change the boot order in bios when I want
to change from one OS to the other. I have an NTFS formatted partition on the Linux disk, which I use for data
sharing between Linux and Windows.

--
Tony
'09 FJR1300, '07 Street Triple OMF#24

[Henry Law]

On 04/10/16 15:50, Andrew May wrote:
> What do people think about the best way to get access to both OSs?
> Dual-boot the machine. Run a single OS with the other in a Virtual
> Machine (in which case, which one?)

I used Virtualbox under Linux to run a Windows 7 VM for a while, but I
got fed up with the awful performance. The VM was pretty slow, and
nothing else on my machine (quad core i5, though a few years old now)
would run worth a damn when Windows was running.

These days I dual boot one of my machines for the odd occasion that I
need Windows software (principally iTunes to interface with an iPad, and
a couple of music production programs).

--

Henry Law Manchester, England

[Raj Kundra]

"Andrew May" <andrew...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:nt0fj8$rr9$1...@dont-email.me...

Installed Windows on one partition on the hard drive and left enough
un-partitioned.

Then installed Ubuntu and it automatically made boot menu which gives me
option to select on boot windows or Linux.

[Adrian Caspersz]

On 04/10/16 15:50, Andrew May wrote:

Give yourself an excuse to buy a Microserver and use it both as a server
(hypervisior if you want and have memory) and something to run one of
the OSs on. It can be headless, and you can remote desktop into it,
hence have a screen environment where you have both linux and windows
apps running. Dual booting is a pain, for me a real interruption to work
flow.

I have my main machine (a microserver) on Ubuntu, and other boxes
including microservers are running a mix of Windows and other linux
systems etc... Remmina is a great tool to access them all.

However, there is also that Windows 10 promise of native running of
Linux applications. Kleenex wipes for spilt coffee are available....

--
Adrian C

[Andrew May]

I quite like that idea. I was just about to upgrade the boot disk to a
240Gb SSD, perhaps two 128Gb SSDs would be better option.

[Andrew May]

On 05/10/2016 10:15, Adrian Caspersz wrote:
> On 04/10/16 15:50, Andrew May wrote:
>> Currently using Windows on my main machine but there are now several
>> Linux applications that I prefer.
>>
>> What do people think about the best way to get access to both OSs?
>> Dual-boot the machine. Run a single OS with the other in a Virtual
>> Machine (in which case, which one?) or go down the route that I have
>> never tried before and run both under a single hypervisor like Xen?
>
> Give yourself an excuse to buy a Microserver and use it both as a server
> (hypervisior if you want and have memory) and something to run one of
> the OSs on. It can be headless, and you can remote desktop into it,
> hence have a screen environment where you have both linux and windows
> apps running. Dual booting is a pain, for me a real interruption to work
> flow.

Sadly I do not think that a microserver is going to give me anything
like the performance that I get from my i7 with 32Gb RAM so I am really
looking for a solution that runs on my existing PC.

I am sure there will come a time when microservers have something faster
than an i7 as standard and 32Gb is considered too little. But we are not
there (quite) yet.

[Johnny B Good]

On Tue, 04 Oct 2016 15:50:30 +0100, Andrew May wrote:

The idea of dual booting has never appealed to me other than with test
rigs when the chosen OS really, really must be installed directly onto
the hardware so when I was experimenting (again!) with Ubuntu 10.04 and
12.04 (IIRC) some 3 to 4 years ago, I decided to try out Oracle's
VirtualBox (version 4.xxx AFAICR) with win2k and winXP VMs. I was
pleasantly impressed with the results especially considering the hardware
(a micro ATX AM2+ MoBo with on-board Nvidia graphics with 2 or 4 GB of
DDR2 ram and a single core Semperon).

I knew I'd be radically upgrading my win2k desktop machine some 2 to 3
years later and was anticipating the need to finally retire win2k as a
host OS. With subsequent MSFT windows versions only going from bad to
worse with each "upgrade", I was pretty certain I'd be using a 'modern'
Linux distro as the host OS and being able to still run the few 'Must
Have' windows only app software was an important consideration in my next
planned upgrade.

At the time of testing, I was able to get a usb connected film scanner
to work in the winXP VM (despite claims on the box that the minimum
windows version it could be run in was win2k, the truth of the matter was
that it needed winXP so I couldn't use it with my win2k desktop machine
anyway). Encouraged by this, I also installed and tested the Quake2 and
Unreal games which ran surprisingly well, considering the hardware spec
(certainly more than 'just playable' in an 800 by 600 resolution - a nod
of acknowledgement to the limitations of the on-board graphics).

As per my expectations, the games performed better in the win2k VM but
when it finally came to the actual upgrade a year last April using Linux
Mint Rebecca KDE 64 ver 17.1 with a 3.8GHz clocked quad core AMD 4300 and
8GB of DDR3 ram, this performance difference became switched around. :-(

However, after some considerable fettling of the VMs I was able to see a
threefold performance boost when running MpegStreamClip in the winXP VM
to convert the m2t PS files recorded by Kaffeine into mpg PS files for
archiving onto the NAS box. Considering that the earlier hardware wasn't
too shabby for its time (it included a dual core 3.1GHz clocked Phenom
and 3GB of DDR2 ram and an Intel 180GB SSD (plus a couple of HDDs)), I
was quite pleased with the overall result (I'd limited the VMs to 2 cores
and 2GB for the win2k and 3 GB for the winXP VMs).

For me, hosting VirtualBox on a Linux distro with winXP and win2k VMs
has worked out rather nicely. The only major downside being the rather
shabby support for 3D driver support of the not too shabby EN 8400 GS
graphics adapter inherited from the previous hardware setup. However,
eliminating the need to inflict antivirus and antimalware on the machine
was a major bonus and the main justification to quit MSFT's world of pain
(little did I realise at the time *just* how much worse *this* was going
to become with win 10 - turns out my decision was even better than I'd
originally thought it was!).

Anyway, you can run VirtualBox (or its alternatives) under windows and
setup Linux VMs if 3D graphics performance is vital to your needs and
you're accepting of the need to install the necessary AV and antimalware,
anti-spyware tools. If you decide to try the virtualisation route, the
choice as to which way round you want to arrange this is entirely yours
(I've never tried hosting guest VMs under windows - it just seems so
wrong to me).

Dual booting with a modern desktop PC blessed with a quad core cpu on-
board and 8+GB of ram just seems a waste of resources to me. Modern multi-
cored cpu based systems seem to be just crying out to be used for
virtualisation imo. Oracle's VirtualBox represent the cheapest way to
experiment with virtualisation. It may not be the best virtualisation
software out there but it's not too far behind the commercial
alternatives costing hundreds or even thousands of pounds. If you can
spare the time to experiment, it's well worth trying it out with a
suitable Linux distro.

Any VirtualBox created guest VMs can be used either directly or imported
into more expensive alternative Hypervisor or virtualisation solutions so
your efforts needn't be wasted if you do decide to 'upgrade' later on. In
any case, the principles remain pretty well much the same with all
virtualisation software so the experience alone will prove useful even if
you land up having to recreate your guest VMs all over again.

Of course, there's always the hypervisor hosted option where every
desktop machine is a guest VM without a Linux or windows host in sight
but this tends to be the most expensive route. The last time I looked,
there were only commercial hypervisor solutions available to eliminate
the question of choosing between windows or a *nix host OS. For all I
know, this may have changed by now (but I rather doubt it).

--
Johnny B Good

[TMack]

It eliminates any risk of problems with Linux Grub or Windows bootloader messing up a dual boot disk. It also
increases the chances of successful recovery if something goes wrong. If you go down that route, bear in mind
that both disks should be partitioned in the same way - either MBR or GPT but don't try to mix them or things
could get messy.

[Adrian Caspersz]

On 05/10/16 17:28, Andrew May wrote:

>
> Sadly I do not think that a microserver is going to give me anything
> like the performance that I get from my i7 with 32Gb RAM so I am really
> looking for a solution that runs on my existing PC.

Ah, OK. Me server user, you desktop.

> I am sure there will come a time when microservers have something faster
> than an i7 as standard and 32Gb is considered too little. But we are not
> there (quite) yet.

A microserver is intentionally a low power server thing, they will never
use an i7 and really shouldn't.

With that amount of memory and CPU, I again wouldn't bother with dual
boot. Just run up VMs as necessary. My preferred environment for that is
Microsoft Hyper-V (well, I work with server versions of windows), but
yeah there are others.

--
Adrian C

[Daniel James]

In article <nt0fj8$rr9$1...@dont-email.me>, Andrew May wrote:
> What do people think about the best way to get access to both OSs?

Two separate machines on a network.

It depends, really, on whether you need to be able to run Windows and
Linux applications at the same time, or just to be able to switch
between one system and the other.

I have several machines, so I can run Windows on one and Linux on the
other. That's not what I do most of the time, though: I run Linux
natively and Windows in a VM under VirtualBox. That has the advantage
that I can cut and paste between Windows applications and Linux ones if
I need to. There's a performance hit, but it's not huge. The only real
problem is applications that need access to hardware that isn't
virtualized or isn't virtualized well enough (or fast enough) to be
useful. I have also run Linux in a VM on a Windows system (using VMware
workstation, at a client site), and that worked pretty well, too.

At one point I had a Windows 7 development system in one VM and a
Windows 7 test system in another VM running in a domain controlled by a
Windows 2008 server in another VM (and all in 8GB on a laptop). It
served its purpose, and I was able to demonstrate a networked system to
the client without carrying three PCs to his office.

I sometimes run Linux applications in a Linux VM under Linux, that can
be useful if you want to isolate the host system from a possibly
misbehaving application, or want to test something in a repeatable
environment (run test, reset to snapshot, run next test).

Sometimes, though, you do need to have Windows running natively. In
another thread I tell the story about a Samsung DVD writer whose
firmware I had to update, and that I found I could only do so on a
native Windows system. For occasions like that I take the hard drive
out of the system and swap it for one with Windows on it -- it's not
hard, because I build my PCs with the hard drive in a removable caddy
(it does mean that I have to swap disks to do a system update from time
to time, though, which is a bore).

--
Cheers,
Daniel.

[TMack]

On Wed, 05 Oct 2016 20:35:41 +0100, Daniel James wrote:

> I sometimes run Linux applications in a Linux VM under Linux, that can
> be useful if you want to isolate the host system from a possibly
> misbehaving application,

Have you looked at https://www.qubes-os.org/ as an option for isolating applications? It needs pretty serious
hardware to run effectively but it's an intriguing approach.

[Richard Kettlewell]

Henry Law <ne...@lawshouse.org> writes:
> On 04/10/16 15:50, Andrew May wrote:
>> What do people think about the best way to get access to both OSs?
>> Dual-boot the machine. Run a single OS with the other in a Virtual
>> Machine (in which case, which one?)

Depends on your needs. Dual-boot is a pain if you want to switch
frequently. Virtualization can be a problem with certain kinds of
hardware access and performance. Having two computers has money and
space costs.

> I used Virtualbox under Linux to run a Windows 7 VM for a while, but I
> got fed up with the awful performance. The VM was pretty slow, and
> nothing else on my machine (quad core i5, though a few years old now)
> would run worth a damn when Windows was running.

FWIW I’ve found Linux under Hyper-V acceptable. My relevant performance
requirements are mostly related to CPU speed & memory bandwidth (typical
applications being compilation, crypto, mathematically constructed
graphics) and the host is reasonably speedy (or was by the standards of
2013 when I bought it l-)

I’ve never got on well with VirtualBox, and never fully understood why
it’s so popular.

--
http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo <e5jum5...@mid.individual.net>, Adrian Caspersz
<em...@here.invalid> escribió:

>However, there is also that Windows 10 promise of native running of
>Linux applications

Ha! :)

MICROS~1 have gone awfully quiet on that.

--
(\_/)
(='.'=) systemd: the Linux version of Windows 10
(")_(")

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo <nt0fj8$rr9$1...@dont-email.me>, Andrew May
<andrew...@hotmail.com> escribió:

>Currently using Windows on my main machine but there are now several
>Linux applications that I prefer.
>
>What do people think about the best way to get access to both OSs?

A personal view, using my own PCs at home:

1) Dual-boot doesn't appeal as I leave the (Win7) machine running 24/7
with a mix of apps running. Uptime can be a couple of months without a
reboot.

2) I tried VMs. VirtualBox worked initially but now blue screens Win7
when started and I have to restart all my apps. I can't be bothered
trying to diagnose it (see 1) so gave up.

At work my desktop PC ran Linux, with WinXP, then Win7, running in a VM
for the few Windows apps I wanted to use. At first I used VMware, then
VirtualBox. No issues.

Nowadays, I run Windows and Linux on two separate machines. It's the
easiest solution *for my needs*. This may not appeal to you, or not be
suitable. Hardware is dirt cheap nowadays and I have the space for it.
Getting data from one to t'other is easy over the LAN, and the printer
is networked so I can print from both.

[Daniel James]

In article <nt4ue9$k16$3...@dont-email.me>, TMack wrote:
> Have you looked at https://www.qubes-os.org as an option for isolating
> applications?

I hadn't. It looks interesting, thanks.

--
Cheers,
Daniel.

[David]

On Wed, 05 Oct 2016 17:27:53 +0100, Andrew May wrote:

I would go for two discs as well.

I have run dual boot with grub and grub2 and it is fine whilst it works.

However I have had problems when discs fail, or are changed (grub2 seems
to use an absolute disc ID of some sort so having a new disc on the same
SATA port doesn't seem to cut it).

I have had to do a repair install a couple of times on Windows because of
grub2 problems associated with disc problems.

So having two independent discs both of which will boot when alone in the
system, or with one or more discs alongside, is to me the safest system.

Dual boot is good when you have only one disc drive and don't want a
second.

Cheers

Dave R



--
Windows 8.1 on PCSpecialist box

[Jaimie Vandenbergh]

On Tue, 4 Oct 2016 15:50:30 +0100, Andrew May <andrew...@hotmail.com>
wrote:

VM all the way.

Before VM was a possibility I had up to five OSes at once on my PC,
PCdos/MSdos+Windows/OS2/Linux/BeOS on one HDD at worst I think. It's
faffy and every time there's a chance your boot setup will get mashed.

Nowadays I just spin up a VM. My primary desktop is a macOS box, and I
run a Win10 VM in VMware for the two Windows apps I regularly use that
have never been ported.

Which is the host depends on which you prefer to work in. Sounds like
you want Windows as the host and Linux as the VM, from the short
description above. Using VMware gets you useful integration between OSes
(shared desktop, shared clipboard, cross-OS app launching) that a
hypervisor won't. You'll get some of that with Virtualbox.

Hypervisors are more useful for completely isolated OS instances that
just happen to run simultaneously on the same hardware.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
Some people have years of experience.
Some have one year's experience several times.