Dual-Virtualization vs. Dual-Boot vs. Single-Virtualization

drywall_dan

A friend of mine recently suggested something that intrigued me: in the case of needing multiple Operating Systems simultaneously, instead of dual-booting or using multiple computers, one could use a low-level host that consumed effectively zero resources that would host two virtual systems. You'd have the benefit of splitting the computer's resources evenly between the systems and the option of using only one system at a time. As an example:...

Originally asked by Thomas on Stack Exchange (superuser) (CC BY-SA 3.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

The problem is your "host" is far from one that would consume zero resources, and is essentially an operating system itself. You would be better off installing a small distribution of Linux, essentially acting as a "host operating system", and running both of your required operating systems at once. The problem with a discrete OS host is management of resources . Who decides what OS gets what piece of hardware at what time? Who manages OS priority? Who manages who gets what part of memory in the address space? Who's responsible for managing CPU usage between OSs? How do you handle storage device read/write synchronization between OSs? The only truly way to do it is to do something like...

Full answer by Breakthrough: https://superuser.stackexchange.com/a/419237 (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Need it done for your business? UphillTech.