I know this has nothing to do with MorphOS, that is why I am putting this in the General Discussion Forum. Members here usually answer questions quickly and with great insight and intelligence from their own experiences. I value your collective knowledge.

After my Dell XPS700 died a second mobo failure, I have received my second replacement computer from Dell, as the first one could only run Vista and I refused it, wanting the ability to run XP Pro. What I have now is in my signature line, but I will list it again here, and in more detail anyway.

XPS630i
Core2Extreme Quad Core @3.0GHz
2GB RAM
Dual NVidia 9800GT 512mb graphics cards
2 - 300GB 10,000rpm SATA hard drives (second added by me)
Dual tuner TV card
Sound Blaster X-fi sound card
Windows XP Pro SP3 installed by Dell w/OEM DVD provided
Windows Vista Ultimate Bonus OEM DVD (installed on 2nd hdd by me)
Catweasle Mk3 Flipper (added by me)

My current setup has XP Pro SP3 on one hard drive and Vista Ultimate on the other hard drive.

It is my thought to set up the identical 300GB hard drives as a RAID array to have one 600GB fast hard drive and use one OS as a primary host OS and set up all others as VMware partitions. It is my thought that this will be more convenient than having to reboot each time I wish to use a different OS.

My question, or request for advice is this:

Which OS should I use as my primary, or Host OS, and can I find and install the needed VMware for free, or will I have to pay for a more full featured version of some kind of virtual machine software?

I would like to have access to XP Pro SP3, Vista Ultimate, Ubuntu 8.10, or some other Linux distribution, and if it is some how possible, run a VM of MacOS 10.5.5, as well as be able to remote desktop via my LAN to MorphOS2.1 running on my EFIKA, and perhaps even AmigaOS3.9 running on my A4000 and/or A1200, and lastly perhaps MacOS 10.5.5 running on my MacBook.

It would be great if I could easily run all of the above from one keyboard, monitor and mouse, without having to move from one desk to another, or from one room to another.

I have almost no experience with Linux, but have installed and used Ubuntu a little during the past year. I have no experience setting up a RAID, but assume that XP Pro, or Vista both have wizards that will easily get that done for me. I have used remote desktop sharing in the past on Windows, but another person set it up. On the Mac it is easy with iChat.

I have read (IIRC) that there are remote desktop clients for MorphOS and AmigaOS. So, I am hoping that I can set them up to use from my XPS system.

Do any of you have answers or advice for me? I have looked around Online and found some resources for setting up VMware on XP Pro and on Linux, but none of them made a recommendation as to which OS is best for the Host OS.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Edit: My good sense tells me that using Linux as the Host OS would be the most secure, but if I keep up with my Avast virus protection and Sun Belt firewall on my Windows installations, I might be just as safe using XP Pro, or Vista Ultimate as the Host OS.

[ Edited by amigadave on 2008/12/15 22:02 ]

Quote:

2* 300Gb in raid would be still 300Gb and not 600Gb

@Oepabakkes

Depends... and looking at what you quoted, it looks like he has RAID 0 in mind.

Quote:

No, depends on type of RAID. Mirrored = safer, RAID0 = faster & full 600GB, but if one drive fails I had better have a very recent backup or I will lose a lot of data.

Not having used RAID before, only working from memory of what I have read, I could not remember which number was which, RAID0, RAID1, RAID5, etc. but I do remember that certain RAID types place data on both drives in a way to use the full space of both drives and increase the speed of writing and reading the data, as opposed to the other RAID type(s) that mirror the data on each drive for more reliability.

I am still a "NOOB" in many ways, but I am a NOOB that has been around a long time and can remember most of what I have seen, or read, or heard.

Edit: Still looking for good advice and opinions. One person told me NOT to use RAID0 and another said to get more RAM and use a 64bit OS, but did not say which one.

[ Edited by amigadave on 2008/12/16 12:29 ]

You can grab VMware Server for free although 1.08 is incompatible with modern "prebaked" disk images and installations, and 2.0 sucks a lot. Server doesn't include anything but basic 2D graphics so if you want anything better - install Linux etc. natively.

Alternatively, VirtualBox is much better than VMware Server.

For a bootloader; use GRUB. Install Windows as your host OS (more flexible - you get better support and you don't need to recompile kernel modules every 5 minutes to keep the host OS and guest OS in sync. Alternatively, disable kernel updates on your Linux box, AND your guests, so you don't have to bother) and you can put VMware or VirtualBox on top for any toying around you might do. Install Linux afterwards and it will pretty much work just fine and dual-boot. I'd recommend Fedora 10 or SUSE 11.1 rather than Ubuntu. Seriously. And you MAY be able to set it up such that the virtualization system uses a raw hard disk (in VirtualBox this is insanely difficult to achieve, though..) and dual-boot AND virtualize the same Linux installation, within reason (just make sure you mount your disks by LABEL=blah rather than any other method, and that both use a libata or scsi layer).

It's doubtful that Dell shipped you a motherboard that would "only run Vista". Actually locking the hardware such that you could not grab a copy of XP OEM or Retail and install it is nigh on impossible.

For RAID under XP or Vista, I assume you're looking for software RAID, in which case, you can install the OS onto one 300GB disk and then right click My Computer, click Manage, go to Disk Management, right click Disk 0, Upgrade to a Dynamic Disk, and go from there setting it up. Works a treat. Check for some documentation first though.

Linux will happily RAID two partitions together using the "dm-raid" driver, and detect an XP/Vista Dynamic Disk setup too.

What I think though is you are jumping into a weird and wonderful world of over-complicating your XPS. Just stick with Windows. Use VirtualBox (it comes with an RDP server too, so you can access the virtual machine by remote using any other RDP client). As for serving AmigaOS/MorphOS over RDP etc, good luck. I think MorphOS has a VNC server graphics driver in 2.1, but not RDP. There are some great clients, but it looks like you're going to have to have two of them going at any one time.

Note: Linux is no more secure than Windows. Or should I say, your Windows installation is not at risk if you're behind some kind of firewall (like a DSL router or so). And you don't even need to buy protection. AVG Free is more than good enough.

Thanks for all the answers and advice Matt.