I personally love K/Qemu, it has never eaten a VM of mine like Vbox has
done repeatedly. The gold standard for Enterprise is VMWare so if this
is for work that is where you want to go.

You're going to need a good amount of RAM.. XP has no EULA requirements
for aa VM, Visata you must have purchased the "higher" cost versions to
legally be able to run in a VM, and Vista does call home. W7 is most
likely the same way and will call home. I tired to load W7 with 1.5 GB
RAM and 10gb hdd and it would not load for me in VM.

Having Linux as the base is a great idea. Any distro can run a VM. If
you're going Enterprise.. you want RHEL4/5 SLES 10/11 and CentOS. Hobby
wise Debian, Slackware, LFS, Crux and there are others out there just
look around Distrowatch.

VampirePenguin


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