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Hi folks,
I am in the process of building up a new workstation for myself and I want to clear our some of my old hardware to lower my power costs. Right now I use 3 physical machines for the work I do.
I keep a single workstation for mail, office/billing uses, and the odd game or two. The second is one I keep most of my development tools like Eclipse/Flex Builder, Visual Studio, Flash and Photoshop on. The third is a 2003 server which I have set to run SQL 2000/2005, Apache2, ColdFusion, Tomcat and IIS. (I work as a consultant and a lot of my clients have different app stacks I really do need to deal with).
My question is which Host OS and which of the virtualization products is going to be best under a couple of criteria.
I want to run all of my dev tools outside of the Host OS, the server testing stuff in VMs (I may separate the roles as needed for each case using mostly 32 bit os's and custom installing them as I need them. I will probably keep another VM with Trac/Mercerial for archival use. So when I am doing my development I will likely have 2-3 VMs running when I am working.
I want my Host OS to still recognize my USB Headset and Tablet.
The machine I am building will have between 4 and 8 gigs of ram (given how cheap it is these days I am going to stuff the motherboard with as much as I can find) which means my host OS needs to be 64 bit and preferably windows since I know the Headset won't run under a linux box (I tired on an older machine I had setup with Ubuntu a few months ago).
My main debate comes down to do run this in XP 64bit? 2003 Server? or bite the bullet I really don't want and go for the bloat filled Vista 64 bit?
Which VM software has less bloat on the Host OS and yet will do what I need to?
Thoughts and suggestions are greatly welcomed, Thanks
G_K
I am in the process of building up a new workstation for myself and I want to clear our some of my old hardware to lower my power costs. Right now I use 3 physical machines for the work I do.
I keep a single workstation for mail, office/billing uses, and the odd game or two. The second is one I keep most of my development tools like Eclipse/Flex Builder, Visual Studio, Flash and Photoshop on. The third is a 2003 server which I have set to run SQL 2000/2005, Apache2, ColdFusion, Tomcat and IIS. (I work as a consultant and a lot of my clients have different app stacks I really do need to deal with).
My question is which Host OS and which of the virtualization products is going to be best under a couple of criteria.
I want to run all of my dev tools outside of the Host OS, the server testing stuff in VMs (I may separate the roles as needed for each case using mostly 32 bit os's and custom installing them as I need them. I will probably keep another VM with Trac/Mercerial for archival use. So when I am doing my development I will likely have 2-3 VMs running when I am working.
I want my Host OS to still recognize my USB Headset and Tablet.
The machine I am building will have between 4 and 8 gigs of ram (given how cheap it is these days I am going to stuff the motherboard with as much as I can find) which means my host OS needs to be 64 bit and preferably windows since I know the Headset won't run under a linux box (I tired on an older machine I had setup with Ubuntu a few months ago).
My main debate comes down to do run this in XP 64bit? 2003 Server? or bite the bullet I really don't want and go for the bloat filled Vista 64 bit?
Which VM software has less bloat on the Host OS and yet will do what I need to?
Thoughts and suggestions are greatly welcomed, Thanks
G_K