Does this software exist?

Virtual machine that runs before any operating system loads, so it presents you with a boot menu that you can go back to at any time and suspend current OS's.

Would be kinda cool?

i think you have your OSs and virtual machines mixed up.

VMWare is a small os that runs virtual os's

I runs from inside an os though, doesn't it? I mean something that doesn't require you to boot into windows first.

Run VMWare on a bare bones linux distribution? Wouldn't need to boot into Windows first then.

whaa, don't you think it's a cool idea?

I dunno what you mean? I basically do that already.

The initial "virtual machine" has to be an OS of some form. So run some linux dist with just VMWare on it. Then boot up, suspend or whatever multiple virtual boxes on top of that.

ESXi is the closest you get to this. Mini OS that is just a hypervisor. Yes, it's an OS of sorts, but it has a 32MB disk footprint. You slap it on a flash card and boot from it, and store your virtual machines on hard disk based storage. It's even free.

http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/

Obviously this is for servers. It's pointless for desktops.

A brief glance over that link, looks sort of like what I'm talking about.

Perhaps I have it all wrong, I just thought that there might be an advantage to not having to run a run-of-mill OS first because any OS running will be executing services etc that don't need to be running.

Yeah, and you can do that. Perhaps not entirely as an out of the box solution.

You still need some form of OS underneath it.

There are advantages, and that's pretty much exactly what ESXi does. The entire "OS" system is based around providing the exact needed services to drive the hypervisor.



Considering you can order Dell/IBM/HP servers with ESXi preinstalled on built-in flash memory, ready to be turned on and linked to your VM storage pool, yes, you can do it out of the box.

kris is right ESX works like this

and so could a Windows 2008 Server core install.

Not out of the box from a home users point of view though?

well that's a damn obscure use case. what the hell is the point in a home user doing that? a "home user" doesn't need to run multiple OS's simultaneously on one system. that is far far away from the point of virtualisation.

any "home user" who has the need to run multiple OS's and go back in time and suspend them, as smiley suggested in the OP, is going to be smart enough to figure out how to work vmware server or esxi. it's a total piece of piss.

however, this setup isn't going to work for anything hardware intensive, like gaming.

I think thats what harvey was saying, in the context of smileys situation there isnt anything out of the box for a home user.

And a home user isnt going to want the 7-15% hit that even 1:1 virtual machines produce.

far better to have a thin client connecting to a hosted machine.

7-15%??

Why? I thought that the performance would be just about the same as running native.

VM's don't run directly native on the hardware. They run in a virtualised environment, provided by the hypervisor.

Overheads include the hypervisor providing those virtualised interfaces (eg video, network), and the slower rate at which VM's can talk to their virtualised hard drives. VM's don't have a hardd rive as such, their hard drive is simply a file, residing on a hard drive of the host.

Our primary fileserver is actually just this bunch of files:



Otherwise, what you are asking for is simply a boot manager for booting multiple OS's.

hmmm, I suppose, except you can't go back to the boot manager without closing down the current OS.

suspending it should work too afaik. although it's been a long while since i multibooted. because vmware just works for running multiple OS's. i'm still failing to see what the attraction is for the "home user"

yeah probably a a workaround for a broken setup really, have changed it a bit now.