XEN and Windows 7 + Windows XP + Linux

Question

Do you suggest to install Windows 7 + Windows XP + Linux as multi-boot or via XEN? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each choice?

Answer 1

If you want to use the Windows installations for gaming, the easiest path is to install all as multi-boot.

Technically you can also use XEN and run Windows on XEN, but then in order to use the full potential of the graphics card you would need to directly forward it to the Windows VM, and then would not be able to use it for the other OS/VMs at that time.

Also, the current path to give a VM direct access to a GPU is rather difficult and heavily hardware dependant. At the moment, only Intel Motherboards will give you chances of success for such a setup, even well established vendors such as ASUS often do not support the VT-d features completely yet[1].

So in general:
For Gaming: Don't use XEN (yet!)
For anything else it's definately worth a shot, you get a lot of features, such as isolation and snapshotting etc. Though you might want to consider using KVM which is becoming more and more user-friendly.

[1] http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/VTdHowTo