Hi there
I'm a "Refugee" from OPENSUSE -- the last two releases have been IMO BROKEN - can't get Multimedia or VMWARE stuff to work properly

Have just started using Wheezy -- Wish I'd been with Debian earlier -- it just WORKS and the package manger system is light years ahead of SUSE / RPM type of stuff.

However I need to run some Windows VM's - mainly at HOME - not a business server type of stuff - and was looking to see whether I should run these on XEN or VMware workstation. I tried KVM but the video performance was HIDEOUS .

Any suggestions / links

Thanks

i recommend
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...Virtualization

-
i know it's not debian and probably a bit different.
but i have gotten a lot of useful information from archwiki in the past - so much that i decided to change to archlinux in the end.

i am at the moment looking into a similar problem; first of all you have to check if your machine supports kvm. mine doesn't, and that is that. i'm not quitye sure yet what other accelaration options i have. performance is hideous, whether i use virtualbox or qemu.

Hi there

Thanks for the reply.

the main problem with KVM is the use of VNC as the Virtual Machines console -- slow protocol.

XEN might allow me to use the native graphics card as a passthru or VMWARE can install VMWARE TOOLS which "Para virtualises" the system -- I.e tries to run standard emulated hardware in a virtual BIOS.

For servers probably not an issue -- but I'm running the VM's and the HOST OS all on the same box so using VNC is just pointless. !!!

There are also some problems in getting SOUND to work on the GUEST machines too with KVM although fiddling around with the video modse seems to fix that --don't quite know why though.

SDL mode might work for you but that's also problematic.

Incidentally enable VT in the BIOS (or the equivalent if using an AMD processor) if you can --this should also speed things up plus KVM won't install without it being enabled.

I will probably try VMware next as it worked fine on Windows with some Windows guests.

Cheers
jimbo