Virtualization of desktop

Question

I'm thinking about virtualization of my laptop(for educational purposes). My idea is to install very light host OS and have all the rest as virtual machines. Microsoft's Hyper-V Standalone would be very good solution, but it's impossible to access virtual machine from computer, where the Hyper-V is the host(isn't it?). So, which virtualization software would be good for me? I wanna have virtualized Windows 7(and maybe some other windowses). My processor support Intel Virtualization Technology.

Answer 1

If you have the money, you can always get Windows Server 2008 R2 full edition.

You can install Hyper-V on it and the way it gets installed, even if you have SQL and many other things running, it does not slow down the running Virtual Machines. (I forget the technical term of how it runs the primary OS).

Alternatively, you may like to simply run a standard desktop OS such as Windows XP or Windows 7 and optimise it using the guides at Black Viper then install a desktop virtualisation solution such as VMWare Workstation, Microsoft Virtual PC or Sun Virtual Box