[ale] Taking the plunge

[jb at sourceillustrated.com (John Wells)]

----- "Matt Kubilus" <mattkubilus at gmail.com> wrote:
> VMware provides a free version of their server product.  You might
> not
> get the performance of Xen, but with a dual core it should be close.

Xen won't virtualize Windows without the virtualization support (AMD-V or Intel VT) in your CPU. To tell if you can, do

$ egrep '^flags.*(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo

Or, check your cpu here: http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/HVM_Compatible_Processors

There's also kvm, which is a competing technology that supposedly has better support from the kernel developers. Here's an interview with the developer (also where I found the instructions above): http://kerneltrap.org/node/8088

Your two best options are Qemu and VMWare Player. Both work well are are free. I used Qemu for a long time, but switched to vmplayer to try it out and haven't gone back. It works for me, on the rare occasion that I require Windows.

John