Virtual machine that can also be booted natively?

[jtusa]

Is it possible to have a primary OS (Windows 7), run VMs (Linux) on that host, but also have the option to boot directly into that VM natively.

I have a Windows 7 machine, and I run Ubuntu as a VM. Is there any software that will allow me to boot directly to a VM like that? Or have a dual boot system with Win 7 and Linux that will also allow me to run the Linux OS as a VM or whatever while booted into Windows?

Hope that makes sense.

Mods, feel free to move this to the OS forum if you think it would be more appropriate there.

 

[MrChad]

I've seen it done before using VMWare and Windows as the VM / OS partition. You'll need to setup separate hardware profiles (not sure what the equivalent is in *nix), as the hardware will be different if you boot as a VM vs. a native OS.

Check out http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/ws_disk_dualboot.html

 

[jtusa]

I've seen it done before using VMWare and Windows as the VM / OS partition. You'll need to setup separate hardware profiles (not sure what the equivalent is in *nix), as the hardware will be different if you boot as a VM vs. a native OS.

Check out http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/ws_disk_dualboot.html

Nice, looks like the trick is hardware profiles which makes sense. I'll have to dick around with this over the weekend. Thanks.

 

[Nothinman]

You shouldn't need to worry about hardware profiles with Linux, it should autodetect whatever hardware is available fresh on every boot. The only gotcha is that a few things like network card, hard disk, etc names will vary but both of those are easy to work around if they cause issues.

 

[jtusa]

Got it working. Had Win7 installed, installed Ubuntu 10.10 on a separate partition, same drive, can boot into either. Then with VMWare Workstation on Win7, created a VM that points to the linux partition for it's disk. That was easier than I thought it'd be.