Bare Metal Hypervisor - Run Win7 + Ubuntu + OSX at the same time

[OnePlane]

Is having two disks absolutely necessary to run Xen (or KVM) on a notebook? Or could partitions or LVM used with an SSD work, too?

 

Yes, that would work. But bear in mind, a storage unit like a hard disk drive has a limit on how fast it can do things. If you use one system, that system can take that limit to itselt. If you use three systems, you might only get 1/3 of the speed. However, usually you are only active in one environment. So if you have two or three systems running, and only one is actually being used, it might work pretty well. I have set-up single-disk virtualisation systems (where performance wasn't the issue), and it does work if you don't task all systems at once.

[samurai]

Hey OnePlane,

Awesome stuff, iv been following this thread since the start of the year hoping someone would come up with a good straight forward guide or solution, to running OSX baremetal with windows or linux easily.

 

Currently, I can run OSX in vmware on windows and put it fullscreen on one of my monitors and it runs pretty good.

Performance is fine and functionality is good.

 

But, if I can get it running on the bare metal I think I would use it more.

Everywhere I look people say that there are tricks required in installing OSX on Xen.

Do you know if there are, or what they are, and is there anything new with Lion.

 

Can you boot a VMDK or other virtual machine drive in XEN? coz iv got those created already and that would be a simple solution.

 

Also, is there any reason NOT to use Citrix's Xen, compared with the open source project? Is it bad in anyway other than the generic "citrix gayness"?

 

[OnePlane]

Hey OnePlane,

Awesome stuff, iv been following this thread since the start of the year hoping someone would come up with a good straight forward guide or solution, to running OSX baremetal with windows or linux easily.

 

Currently, I can run OSX in vmware on windows and put it fullscreen on one of my monitors and it runs pretty good.

Performance is fine and functionality is good.

 

But, if I can get it running on the bare metal I think I would use it more.

Everywhere I look people say that there are tricks required in installing OSX on Xen.

Do you know if there are, or what they are, and is there anything new with Lion.

 

Can you boot a VMDK or other virtual machine drive in XEN? coz iv got those created already and that would be a simple solution.

 

Also, is there any reason NOT to use Citrix's Xen, compared with the open source project? Is it bad in anyway other than the generic "citrix gayness"?

 

 

Well, I use the Open Source Xen, mostly due to Citrix's gayness And that works fine. Problem with most people/implementations/users is that it takes a bit of time to learn how to configure things properly. In the world of computing, everything is possible, the only limiting factor is people. If you can't or won't configure/setup things yourself, it's not possible to do the three-fold bare-metal setup. There are a few GUIs but mostly it's all about commandline and text configuration files.

 

VMDK is for VMware only. No go there, sorry about that. For Xen, you actually use real virtualisation; you have a physical disk, and you can 'give' it to the Guest OS, and that gives you 100% hardware access to that disk. Or you can use it as a logical disk with LVM, and split it in a few pieces. The Guest OS will think it's a real disk (but it will show up as a Xen SCSI disk), and it will work like a real disk. If the Guest OS is shut-down, you can actually just mount the disk, and all the files etc are there.

 

Mac OS X installation on Xen still requires the OSx86 way, so if you don't want to do that, stop right there

[Lancerlot]

Well, I use the Open Source Xen, mostly due to Citrix's gayness And that works fine. Problem with most people/implementations/users is that it takes a bit of time to learn how to configure things properly. In the world of computing, everything is possible, the only limiting factor is people. If you can't or won't configure/setup things yourself, it's not possible to do the three-fold bare-metal setup. There are a few GUIs but mostly it's all about commandline and text configuration files.

 

VMDK is for VMware only. No go there, sorry about that. For Xen, you actually use real virtualisation; you have a physical disk, and you can 'give' it to the Guest OS, and that gives you 100% hardware access to that disk. Or you can use it as a logical disk with LVM, and split it in a few pieces. The Guest OS will think it's a real disk (but it will show up as a Xen SCSI disk), and it will work like a real disk. If the Guest OS is shut-down, you can actually just mount the disk, and all the files etc are there.

 

Mac OS X installation on Xen still requires the OSx86 way, so if you don't want to do that, stop right there

 

I really like the sound of this and have been looking into Xen quite a lot lately. Can you recommend any documentation or suggestions on what to use and how to set this up?

 

Thank you!

 

EDIT: So I found some good documentation on how to install Xen with Ubuntu Precise Pangolin: http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/XAPI_on_Ubuntu

Seems fairly straight forward though I was hoping to find something that was a bit nicer looking a la XenClient or NxTop.

I'll be playing around with this in the meantime. Cheers!

[crashnburn_in]

I know this thread is old but I have rarely found very many people discussing how amazing it is to have a BareMetal Light Virtualization Platform on which we can run VMs of different OSes.

 

I have just installed XenClient (I think 4.x or so) and I like the concept. I'll see how the implementation suits/ works for thing things I am trying to do.