Linux dual boot?

[Eric Shubert]

Stephen wrote:
> 
> It can help with some performance issues to have your virtual drives
> stored on a seperate physical drive from the OS especially in vmware
> server on windows it can make your system crawl

I can't speak of VMware Server on windows, but on CentOS this doesn't 
seem to be much of a problem. There are however various configuration 
settings that make a huge impact on performance. I've helped to write 
about these at http://wiki.qmailtoaster.com/index.php/VMware.

> I do alot of weird vm things just to try them and there is a setting
> that looks like you can map a virtual machine directly to a physical
> storage device but I'm out of room to test this fully but it would be
> immense to have a dual boot with vm abilities for you to access your
> non dominant os

I've used Raw Device Mapping, and it works nicely. While I haven't used 
it for the OS image, I don't know why that couldn't be done.
See http://wiki.qmailtoaster.com/index.php/VMware#Raw_Device_Mapping

> That's been my holy grail of vm/dual boot (just above accelerated
> graphics in a vm)

I'm not real clear what your objective is (what data you want to share 
between images), but having the data on a raw disk certainly makes it 
more manageable. If you need to access the data from multiple VMs 
concurrently, you can create a VM data server that provides nfs, samba 
and/or netatalk access to your data on the raw drive. This is what I've 
done. I have 2 raw disks that the VM data server uses in a raid-1 mirror 
as well. Sort of a VM backplane. ;)

-- 
-Eric 'shubes'