best virtualization to physical conversion process?

When you virtualize you sacrifice total use of resources at the expense of the various flexibility benefits it may bring.

When you multi-boot into a different os's your stuck in a single os at a time, but, as a home user, you harness all the memory & processing power best.

I wonder if there's a virtualization software which can allow you to fully boot into an image on demand, {even while booted in an os and/or with a bootmenu}... I imagine there isn't... but damn I just thought about it for a moment and thought it would be great to have that flexibility. While I'm at it, this vm ought to have a backup module that allows you to even mount the images in boot menu or on demand... because if you think of it, you have probably have 3 softwares {isr's, backup, vm} that really would be best rolled into one... that would be cool!!!



***In the mean time, can anyone comment as to which is the best virtual machine {virtualbox, vmware, virtual pc} that has a very stable, reliable, smooth virtual to physical conversion process? ***

Thanks

 

Yup, vmware is the one it seems... after your post I did some searching...

VMware has free software download for Vmware p2v conversion
http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/


Here are 6 ways to do the same:



Heres a vmware guide for v2p conversion:
http://www.vmware.com/support/v2p/index.html

It simply involves being instrumental with the sysprep tool, if need be... & imaging software...


lastly, I noticed shadowprotect , http://www.storagecraft.com/products/ShadowProtectIT/
has p2v, v2v, v2p in whats considered to be "complimentary to VMWare™ and Microsoft™
Virtual Server and PC for quick and reliable disaster recovery and system migration." as per their documentation. I assume that means you can do it all with shadowprotect in one step, pretty damn nift. Just about seems to be a far more superior program then Paragon's Drive Backup pro 8.51. Especially if the desktop version of shadowprotect can perform a remote restore over vpn.. awesome product! but that IT vesion is $3,500, ...

 

Remote restore capability via VNC is supported by the ShadowProtect Desktop/Server Edition 3.x products' recovery environment. In the 2.x versions this feature was only available in IT Edition.

 

Xen or VMwares ESX server are close.

These are 2nd level virtualisation, where the common vmware and virtual pc are 3rd level.

2nd level is: virtualisation system (which is also an OS in its most basic form) -> guest os

3rd level is : host OS -> virtualisation system -> guest OS

The guest OS runs more effeciently than with virtualpc or vanilla vmware.
The host OS is essentially a barebones system with a management console.
Provides as much as a direct representation of the hardware as possible to the guest OS (eg you hdd shows are a ibm or maxtor, not a generic virtual device) - it does not emulate hardware as with virtualpc/vmware, but provides an interface to there is minimal peformance hit (obviously there is some performance hit of running mutliple kernels).

Downside is the host machine has to be dedicated to virtualisation.