So my idea is to use a light weight linux OS then run VMware Player inside of that with windows and a couple of others. Would that work and are there other freeware vm solutions to accomplish this? Also what would be the best distro to use since the only thing I will be using it for is running vmware everything else will be handled in the vms?
this doesnt seem to be a very good idea, a while back there was a thing going on on the forum with more advanced ways of virtualization (which i have no idea how they work)
but as for doing it this way i guess oracle virtualbox does the trick *fairly* well, although theres pretty much no graphics capabilities.
What do you want to do with it?
If you want to game you will need GPU passthroug.
The CPU will need VTd or IOMMU (Intel and AMD)
XEN and KVM come with most distros. You can use virt manager to control them with a GUI. And use LXC for other Linux machines since they will share the same kernel and use very few resources.
VMware makes ESXI which can do this but it is a full operating system and not as flexible.
You wool need 2 GPUs one of the Windows VM and one for the host OS.
If you don't plan on gaming (or any thing that requires a GPU) you can use Virtualbox
I do want to game with the windows vm. I also want to have a linux one running for daily use. How does ESXI work?
ESXI is a hyper visor that allows low lvl hardware access to Virtual Machine. you connect to said VM with Vsphere on another computer. But it is hard to do certain things with out a license.
KVM is Kernel Virtual Machine it is baked right into the Linux kernel. Ihas the same abilities but can be ran in full Linux and the same machine can be ran by the Host OS (i.e don't need 2 computers) but you can still connect to it with another PC.It free and open source
Xen has many of the same capabilities as KVM but has a ton of corporate sposor ship with Amazon (EC2 is based on it), Citirx Xenserver which is a direct competitor of ESXI and is free and open source. It is normally installed on most version of Linux or is one command away from installation. I have seen the most success with VM gaming with Xen.
Virt-Manager is an amazing front-end for Xen, KVM and LXC (running multiple copies of Linux with one kernel) It allows you to use all three technologies. Cloudmin is a web front-end which is great if you want to run headless, Proxmox can do the same stuff minus Xen.
Okay great thanks!