Thnking of virtualizing home PC.

Rmp5s

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What's goin on, everyone?

I'm rolling the idea around of virtualizing my home PC. Specs:

Win 7
Intel Core 2 Quad
2X nVidia...something...cards...lol
4GB RAM
like...5 HDDs of varying sizes...
Soon to have a NAS and n-wifi as well.

I'm thinking of doing this with the following goals in mind:

- Make backup and restore of files/data/programs easier.
- Make disaster recovery easier.
- Make running multiple OSs easier.
- Make future hardware upgrades easier.

I'm unsure of which virtual technology to use though. Ideally, I'd like to go a bare-metal "Type-1" hypervisor, eg VMware ESXi, due to the near non-existence of overhead. In my (relatively limited) experience though, ESXi isn't the easiest to manage. From what I understand, it requires another machine and dedicated software to set up the guest machines and manage the hypervisor, you have to make images of machines and import them as opposed to just installing new machines, etc. That's kind of a pain.

My experience with ESXi is limited, but I have used "Type-2" virtualization quite extensively. I may be missing something, but I think it is easier to manage. You run a program and install whatever OSs you want or you can import existing machines. Simple. However, I don't necessarily want to go this route due to overhead. I don't want to have to run an OS in order to run other OSs.

I guess I'm looking for some middle ground. Maybe VirtualBox (or similar) on a really light Linux Distro? Is there a Type-1 hypervisor that isn't too much of a pain to manage?

Any suggestions or ideas would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks!!
 
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