Viable to virtualize my laptop?

Solution 1:

The VM hosts I run are VMWare on top of a very minimal Debian install. I install Debian with next to nothing (not even selecting "standard system" during the install process), add a few tools and accessories that are useful for diagnostics later or that are handy to have at the console generally (psmisc, htop, vim, pv, 7zip, ...), add the libraries needed by VMWare, then install VMWare itself. That is as small as you'll get without hand rolling your own distro.

Unfortunately you have extra complications though: my setups like this are all server boxes with hardware that is known to be good for Linux compatibility. The base Linux setup may require more work on your laptop, for a start you will need to install and configure the relevant support for your wireless adaptor and such. If there is one of the operating systems that you are likely to use more than the others then I might suggest just using that as the host OS with VMWare workstation/server/player atop that for the other OSs - you could always minimise the host's footprint before starting a VM by shutting off services you won't on the host need while using the VMs (like local database servers for instance) - in either Linux or Windows this sort of thing should not be difficult to script.

Solution 2:

My home brew solution to this a few years back was to do a basics only install of Linux and X-Windows on a machine and load VMWare Server. I would then remote into each of the machines I wanted using RDP on linux. I used Fedora Core and Ubuntu for this and it worked well.

Most HyperVisors, which is the technology you refer to, comes with no interface. The most common one's I am aware of his Hyper-V HyperVisor which uses Windows Server 2008 Server Core, and VMware ESX. However the focus of these platforms are mainly server virtualization in managed environment. There isn't any of these catered for the scenario your mentioning.

The closest I can think of would be Xen which comes with Linux itself, however I am not sure if it supports the more rescent hardware virtualization and performance features.

Personally I now use VMWare Fusion on my MacBook for my multiple OS needs and it works well in my environment. The major reason I wanted this was to do demonstrations for talks, and for that I built a notebook with just Virtual Machines on it using Hyper-V. The concept of running multiple OS's wears off quite quickly to be honest, since you end up living in one more then the others. Really analyse your needs and then go this route.

Solution 3:

A stripped down linux is pretty lightweight. I virtualise XP, Vista and ubuntu on top of an Archlinux install on a centrino duo laptop bought in 2000, and the performance is more than adequate.

As Djago and David mention, you'll not easily get more lightweight than a stripped linux install.