Say I had a Core i7 Laptop with 16GB of RAM and a 750gb drive.
Is there a mechanism where I can partition the HD into a Linux, Windows, OS X, Shared Data, Hypervisor setup where I boot a small hypervisor. I can start/stop a linux, Windows and OS X virtual machine and interact with them all from the hypervisor?
Code, Test, etc?
is this a type 1 Hypervisor?
I suppose I could run a small linux install and VmWare but could VmWare read the virtual machines from a physical hard disk partition versus a file based setup (.vmdk files)?
Best Answer
Yes, this is a Type 1 hypervisor. Common Type 1 hypervisors include Xen and VMware vSphere Hypervisor (formerly VMware ESXi Single Server). There should be no problem using the partitions as virtual disks for the VMs, but disk image files on a single partition offer greater flexibility, such as the ability to increase the size of the image and apply data compression to the image (on the host file system) to reduce the disk space required. VirtualBox can access partitions directly; I'm not sure about VMware, but it should be able to do the same.
As long as you have the necessary hardware support (and you do), there should not be a problem with setting up a bare-metal hypervisor on your computer. In fact, my old laptop (8 GB memory, quad-core AMD Phenom II (K10 mobile) processor) now runs Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2, and the VMs get near-native performance.