Hey guy's. I was posting here in regards to the possibility of there being in existence a Linux OS tailored to boot into a VM program (leaving out unnecessary programs and startup-daemons that simply run at boot and have nothing to handle) but to have as many VM's able to be installed, selected and run and then applying guest additions like in VirtualBox to fill the desktop space and give an realistic feel. Say you boot into the modified Linux and you reach the Desktop without the full GUI, leaving out applets and such. But then the option to boot your installed VM's (windows xp, vista, debian, fedora, ETC). If this doesn't exist are there any hickups i might not know about or some general errors that might get in the way? And how do you think the market would be effected by a free OS that runs stable Linux but seamlessly on top runs whichever OS you want without turning of the system and rebooting or having trouble install on your drives due to hardware or whatever.
Just get the free version of ESXi.
You can even start a VM at boot. It's a common trick for advanced security management.
As to what distro: a minimal distro with great security features and a very good kvm implementation. I would definitely suggest Fedora or Arch for that. Debian is a bit old. Fedora has everything in place and is optimizing for many-core processing, which will be very handy for running multiple virtual machines fluently. Arch is also a good alternative, if you don't mind recompiling the kernel in order to implement SELinux. Process control through SELinux is very useful when running kvm containers that operate exposed. You can do without DE, and just fire up the VMs at boot from the CLI. You can even run linux VMs with lxc if they're not exposed to the network, for even more performance, and manage these lxc containers like kvm containers, and you can even run non-x86 containers with qemu.
ESXi runs like a server then, but allowing OS's to be broadcast sort-of? I'm not really familiar with that software. currently im studying linux admin and I was to try and shape a few local businesses who have already purchased a windows CD and not have it go to waste. If i could run a flawless boot trait into the virtual winxp nothing much on the linux side of things like having to enter the commands then that would be best. I was thinking Arch to have the least about of progs running in the background and simply what it needs to have the fully functioning VM. I was thinking maybe the design of a front-end to offer a GUI after the Linux shell boots to be sort of the interface into whichever system they choose. But that is great info guys. But without the DM i would still receive some for of environment for showing the running VM, mouse and what not. The only problem I could see is the issue with external hardware, not just storage, if somebody was trying to plug in a midi keyboard to maybe play an emulated sound generator, i don't think it would be possible to transfer the signals through linux and then down into the virtual winxp. Everything would have to stay within the VM unless there was a cloud or server to extract and storage data.
do you have any concepts on maybe specifically editing a user profile on say fedora to have the reduced running processes and get the emu to activate on loggin? that way ill have a logging for linux and then a login the takes me into winxp. I like keeping things clean ya know.
http://www.proxmox.com/