h3%5kr3w Posted March 6, 2010 Share Posted March 6, 2010 (edited) Ok. So I know about esxi, and xen for bare metal hypervisors to SERVE desktops and servers to other computers via the network, but what I am looking for is a bare metal hypervisor that serves multiple desktops on the same machine. Is there something to this effect somewhere? Or is it possible to do this on an existing hypervisor? My reason being, I want multiple desktops with the fastest available speed that can be switched between back and fourth as if it were virtualbox sitting on top of linux with the cube enabled or the wall enabled. Now I could go this route if nothing else exists, utilizing a minimalistic linux w/just virtualbox but I would like to get the fastest multiple desktop/one box system available. As always any help is appreciated. Edited March 6, 2010 by h3%5kr3w Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparda Posted March 6, 2010 Share Posted March 6, 2010 This cannot be done without the assistance of hardware vendors for all the hardware in a computer. The hardware vendors would have to provide a driver that offers an API to control access to hardware, thus allowing the hypervisor OS to disallow access to hardware when you switch VMs. The closest thing you will get to this currently is individual computers, a KVM switch and a shared file system. The only real market for such a technology would be cross platform software developers who develop graphics and sound and other hardware requirement based software, so any such software would, most likely, be hardware and software and would be incredibly expensive. In addition to this, it would be very awkward to use for the developer if they are developing a driver for a piece of hardware, despite having this amazing ability to switch between the two OS's simultaneously, they would still need to reboot the VM's when moving the hardware they are developing for to another VM. That is unless the hypervisor implemented some sort of pseudo hot swappable PCI/PCI Express, but then, OSs running would also have to support hot swappable PCI/PCI Express. It's a nice idea, but it not going to happen unless you build one your self and with no expectation of convincing any one to buy it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
h3%5kr3w Posted March 6, 2010 Author Share Posted March 6, 2010 (edited) Thank you Sparda! Actually after some thought that would be a conundrum. Over anything, the video driver scheme would be hell. For the most part, hypervisors do seem to support hardware on all aspects EXCEPT the video, but then the issue would persist, that unless you have two video cards with one os assigned to each one, with one driver running on top of some passthrough driver for the hypervisor itself, it's next to impossible. Actually on the hot swap scheme I thought that it would be cool for some sort of implementation of the hypervisor itself handling the usb/firewire/etc. to just display a general overlay over the currently displayed vm asking which one the hot swapped hardware should be assigned to but which would require something like a passback driver for each vm to communicate directly with the hypervisor. Oh well, it was a pipe dream of sorts, but this would be a really kick ass alternative to dual booting. Edited March 6, 2010 by h3%5kr3w Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
barry99705 Posted March 6, 2010 Share Posted March 6, 2010 Thank you Sparda! Actually after some thought that would be a conundrum. Over anything, the video driver scheme would be hell. For the most part, hypervisors do seem to support hardware on all aspects EXCEPT the video, but then the issue would persist, that unless you have two video cards with one os assigned to each one, with one driver running on top of some passthrough driver for the hypervisor itself, it's next to impossible. Actually on the hot swap scheme I thought that it would be cool for some sort of implementation of the hypervisor itself handling the usb/firewire/etc. to just display a general overlay over the currently displayed vm asking which one the hot swapped hardware should be assigned to but which would require something like a passback driver for each vm to communicate directly with the hypervisor. Oh well, it was a pipe dream of sorts, but this would be a really kick ass alternative to dual booting. VMWare is currently working on something like this for cell phones. I guess somebody there is tired of carrying around multiple phones. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Netshroud Posted March 6, 2010 Share Posted March 6, 2010 IIRC XenClient does this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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