So here's the deal: For some time, I've been running Windows as my main desktop OS with Gentoo Linux in a VM. I've been thinking that running the systems concurrently in a hypervisor instead of one on top of the other would be better. For this reason, I've been looking at Xen, but I'm not quite sure if it's the right thing to use here.
A few things to consider:
- I need to be able to bring up a full-blown desktop view of each VM.
- I need to be able to easily switch between VMs.
- I do play the occasional game and mess with game dev, so I need hardware graphics acceleration (I have a PCIe-based NVIDIA GTX 580).
- I have a Gigabyte Z68X-UD3-B3. I'm honestly not sure if it supports VT-d. The manual doesn't seem to mention it.
- My CPU does support VT-x.
- The whole setup needs to have performance comparable to my current setup. I can tolerate some performance loss, but it shouldn't be outright slow.
Is Xen the right thing for me? If not, what else could I use (preferably something free, or at least affordable for a student)?