[WLUG] usability/features of windows as KVM/QEMU or virtualbox guest

[Dan Pritts]

Hi folks -

After yet another crapware infestation on the family windoze PC, I’m considering converting to a desktop hypervisor setup.  (Converting her to run Linux directly is extremely unlikely, an argument I’m just not interested in having.)

I have very good luck using windows 7 as a guest of vmware fusion on my mac.  Take a snapshot after every set of updates, restore the snapshot for each new session, and no matter what crap gets installed in windows, I just revert the snapshot.  

My initial thought was just to install linux on the PC, and buy vmware workstation and go from there.  Then I saw the price of workstation - $250 list.  That was a bit spendy by comparison to fusion, which is $80 list.  

As a result, I’m interested in the desktop experience when running KVM/QEMU or virtualbox (or Xen?  Or whatever else is available?).  The big things that come to mind are:

stability
ease of making and managing snapshots
virtual hardware compatibility - graphics seems like the likely stumbling block

This is a windows question, but I”m also curious about putting the windows profile/home directory on a samba share.  Any issues there?

thanks
danno