I’m looking into using virtual machines to host multiple OSes and I’m looking at the free solutions which there are a lot of them. I’m confused by what a hypervisor is and why are they different or better than a ‘standard’ virtual machine. When I mean standard I going to use the benchmark virtual machine VMWare Server 2.0.
For a dual core system with 4 GB of ram that would be capable of running a max of 3 VMs. Which is the best choice? Hypervisor or non-hypervisor and why? I’ve already read the Wikipedia article but the technical details are over my head. I need a basic answer of what can these different VM flavors do for me.
My main question relates to how I would do testing on multiple environments. I am concerned about the isolation of OSes so I can test applications on multiple OSes at the same time. Also which flavor gives a closer experience of how a real machine operates?
I’m considering the following:
(hypervisor)
- Xen
- Hyper-V
(non-hypervisor)
- VirtualBox
- VMWare Server 2.0
- Virtual PC 2007
*The classifications of the VMs I’ve listed may be incorrect.
The main difference is that Hyper-V doesn’t run on top of the OS but instead along with the system it runs on top of a thin layer called hypervisor. Hypervisor is a computer hardware platform virtualization software that allows multiple operating systems to run on a host computer concurrently.
Many other virtualization solution uses other techniques like emulation. For more details see Wikipedia.