External Virtual Machines

[Obeechi]

Gee... I just realized that if I, a mere 100GB MacBook Pro owner, were to clone my hard drive with osx to a larger external usb partition / drive... and booted from this external drive... and installed virtual machines for Vista, Xp, Linux, Solaris... then I could go ahead and run all these virtual machines... whereas right now I keep struggling to squeeze enough space out of my internal hard drive...

That would mean having two bootable partitions per external drive... one for saving data... and the other more mutable... for adding these virtual machines... and removing everything extraneous... and booting from this other drive... and then accessing data and programs from the mac stored on the internal hard drive...

Try doing that on another machine...

So I just got done configuring my external hard drives... and now this realization...

[getwired]

I wouldn't run your main OS over USB... firewire perhaps - but USB latency and processor utilization will cost you...

MHO.

[Obeechi]

Well... the thing is... if I want to use a Virtual Machine while booted into OSX from an external hard drive... if I'm using USB.. then I can access files that are on the internal drive (I know I could when booted via USB.. cause I did... )

Not even sure if I could run a VM while booted via firewire...

[getwired]

Should be able to have it work... Macs could boot from Firewire before they could boot from USB, IIRC.

[Obeechi]

Yes and it does... but having the virtual machine access the internal drive (from the external drive) over Firewire is another matter

[getwired]

Ah... Not sure...

[BP9906]

I have all my VMs on my firewire external drive and they run perfectly. No delay at all. OSX is on my internal drive and my internal is also partitioned for Vista. Just thought I'd give my experience w/ my setup.

[Obeechi]

Well can your external vm access the internal vista data across the firewire...

[cause]

Does this mean that I could run OS X from a separate fire-wire drive with a partition for windows with minimal or no install in my primary hd? I would like to have a pseudo-raid security, with the fire-wire drive as my only multiple OS drive. I would have a Mac OS X only, but have windows software that I would like to run on a Mac, as I am sure many people do in today's computing environment.