Newbie Hypervisor Questions

Question

1. If I install a bare-metal hypervisor (say, ESXi), would it allow me to run Windows 7 concurrently with Linux?

2. Would it allow me to run multiple instances of Windows 7?

3. When I'm sitting at the PC that's running Win7 and Linux on a hypervisor, which OS do I see when I look at the screen? (I'm suspecting that the only way to access either OS is to do a remote login.)

4. Assuming the answer to #2 is yes, how do you manage multiple installs of Win7 on the same hard drive?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

If you simply want to run Linux and Windows in parallel you may of course do this on e.g. ESXi. Still, the OSes would run with virtualized (or emulated) hardware available to them, i.e. you would not be able to easily access all the hardware directly and the hypervisor itself not only introduces an overhead but this overhead is not deterministic. If you want to run an RTOS (like Real-Time Linux) or any other RTOS, then you need a "real-time hypervisor". You can google for such hypervisors - there are a few out there. (I dont want to recommend one here as we are a vendor of such a solution our selves) Regards GFL