Multiple Operating Systems for web development

[webtechnz]

Hi all,

I have a question about how to configure my system to handle multiple OS's for the purpose of web development.

Components to my system are:
Gigabyte GA-EP43-S3L mobo found at: http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/...e=GA- EP43-S3L
1 x Gigabyte NVidia GTX275 896i GPU
4GB ddr2 800 ram
800W PSU
Intel Core 2 QUAD Q9650 CPU
1 x Western Digital 300 GB, SATA 3 Gb/s, 16 MB Cache, 10,000 RPM HDD for Windows 7 and apps.
1 x Western Digital 1 TB, SATA 3 Gb/s, 32 MB Cache, 7200 RPM HDD (for data storage)
3 x Western Digital 500 GB, SATA 3 Gb/s, 32 MB Cache, 7200 RPM HDD's

The desired configuration would be:
On the WD 300GB VelociRaptor HDD I would like to run Windows 7 as my main system with all of it's associated applications.
On each of the WD 500GB Black Caviar HDD's I would like to run the following OS's:
- Windows 2003 server
- Windows 2008 server
- Linux

All of the above drives are SATA and this is the first time I have used these drives as opposed to IDE (yeah I know, I should get with the times...lol...well I am trying), so any advice on what is the best way to set this system up would be greatly appreciated. I know that Windows 7 has XP Mode running in a virtual machine and this is great for all the XP apps that I currently own.

Thanks in advance peoples for your input here :)

[Lsdmeasap]

I really recommend you check out Vmware for this purpose. I use it for building IPB Skins and checking in various systems, works great

[webtechnz]

Hi Lsdmeasap,

Thanks for your reply here. I checked out Vmware and this looks like a nice solution. Tell me please, what sort of performance issues do you have running multiple OS's at the same time on your machine?

I am a little concerned as I only have 4GB ram and am limited here because I will be installing Win 7 32bit etc that can only address upto 4GB ram. Also, the applications I will be running are Visual Studio, Photoshop CS4, SQL Server 2008 on this platform and just those together will soak up all the ram there. However, my mobo can have up to 16GB ram, not that I think it matters in this case because of the limitations of the OS's.

Do I still install the different OS's on each of the 500GB HDD's that I have and will Vmware acknowledge this? Sorry for the lack of understanding here but I have not done any of this before so am very unsure of the right way to set all this up from the get go. I have been looking at multiboot options as well but it seems that many are having difficulties with this.

Again, your solution looks very nice and the reason I purchased the Intel Q9650 CPU was because it had Virtualisation Technology built in to cater for virtual machine scenarios, or at least, that is what I was led to believe from all the googling I have done here for this.

Any advice here again would be most appreciated, thanks in advance :)

[webtechnz]

Hi,

Does anyone else have any further comments here?

Thanks

[kg4icg]

Virtual box, is a lot better plus the fact you can select how many cores you actually want to use, and works better than vmware. VirtualBox