I find myself in this similar bind at least once a year. The bind whereby I'm either upgrading a motherboard, or an OS hard drive. It drives me crazy to have to reinstall Windows, Visual Studio, all my addins, reconfigure my settings etc… every single time. I have a layout and I like and I want to stick with it.
My question is…
Is there a Bare Metal Hypervisor on the market that will enable me to virtualize my consumer grade workstation? I really want to avoid Host/Client virtualization. Bare Metal is definitely a better way to go for my needs.
Is this a good approach, or am I going to suffer some other undesirable side effects by doing this?
Clarification
My machine has very limited purposes. My primary use is Visual Studio 2010 Professional where I develop ASP.NET MVC Web Applications. The second piece of software that I use (that's system intensive) is Photoshop CS3. Beyond that, my applications are limited to Outlook, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, LinqPad, and various other (small) apps.
Beyond this, I'm considering working on a node.js project and might run ubuntu on the same hypervisor if possible.
System Specs:
Gigabyte Motherboard
Intel i7 920
12 GB Ram
basic 500GB 7200RPM HDD for OS
4 VelociRaptors in Raid 1/0 for build disk
Dual GTS250 (512MB) Graphics cards (non SLI) for quad monitors
On a side note
I also wouldn't be opposed to an alternative suggestion if the limitations are too great. I could install the ESXi (or Zen Server) on my box, and build a separate "thin client" to RDP into the virtual machine. It appears as though RDP supports dual monitors.
Edit (Dec 9, 2011)
It's been nearly a year since I first asked this question. Since then, there have been a lot of great strides in Hypervisor technology… AND MokaFive is now released for corporate use.
I'd love to dig into this question a little more and find out if there is a solid BareMetal Hypervisor for workstations running consumer grade components (IE: not Dell, HP, Lenovo, Etc).
Best Answer
It's not a good idea to use a Type 1 hypervisor like VMware ESX/ESXi, Hyper-V, Xen, etc, for a desktop workstation. They are designed for server use, and you will not be able to use USB or Firewire ports or use hardware accelerated 3D graphics.
You would be better off using a hosted virtualisation program. I think VMware Workstation would be ideal for your use, until MokaFive becomes available.
EDIT: There is a trial of MokaFive available on the website.
New Information
You should have a look at Citrix XenClient, which is a component of the XenDesktop suite, but is also available standalone for free, for up to ten clients.
Unfortunately, it seems to be only compatible with certain OEM brands of laptops and workstations (where the hardware is known).
I've not got around to trying it out myself yet, but I plan to use it soon.
Best Option: Hyper-V (free)
I have only just now noticed that you are open to using a separate thin client and server setup. This will allow you to use a Type 1 hypervisor intended for servers, for workstation use through RDP. The VMware ESXi hardware compatibility list is quite restrictive, while Hyper-V can run on just about anything. Hyper-V also has a very big advantage for what you want to do - RemoteFX. This will allow you to use hardware accelerated 3D graphics cards on your Hyper-V host (your graphics cards are supported!) through RDP. I think this will work very well for you. You may want to investigate if a gigabit switch and dual-gigabit NIC teaming will give you even better performance with this setup with powerful graphics cards.
Latest Update
Windows 8 includes a bare metal hypervisor which it runs on top of - Client Hyper-V.