Quote:
Originally Posted by JMJ_coder
At work I am setting up a workstation for myself that will need virtualization. It will run Slackware 12.1 and will need to emulate Windows XP. The primary software that will be run will be MS Office and maybe some kind of vnc.
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If the CPU supports hardware virtualisation (Intel VT-D, AMD SVM), I'd recommend KVM. It basically turns the host Linux kernel into a hypervisor, and provides full-virtualisation (which means you can run pretty much any OS as a guest). If you use Linux kernel 2.6.25 or 2.6.26 in the host, and KVM 71 or 72, then you can also use paravirtual network drivers in Windows to get near-native network speeds. There's work on a paravirtual block driver for Windows, that will eventually allow it to get near-native harddrive speeds as well.
Plus, you get a simple, standard VNC console to all of your virtual machines. No need to install rdesktop or VNC in the guest, and no need to use a standalone access tool like VMWare/VBox.
(Yeah, I'm a KVM pimp right now.)