When you plan to install two Operating Systems, this is the first question you must be asking yourself. Remembering the windows 98 days we just get mesmerized. We had always been in love with the OS so always wanted it as our operating system.
Initially Windows Xp was buggy so as system administrators we had to have windows 98 parallel to Windows Xp. However as our clients got accustomed with the look and feel of Windows Xp (Service pack 2) we dropped Windows 98.
Dual booting or Virtual Machine :
It is always a challenge to keep both OS operational without any glitches in a dual booting operating system. This is primarily because a bad shutdown on active (working) OS won’t be recognized by the passive (non-working) OS. So the active OS will run chkdsk while the passive operating system may develop bad data sectors going unchecked.
At the same time a dual booting OS recognizes all the hardware on the system. This makes it easy to install hardware in a dual booting scenario. Installing hardware on the Virtual machine varies in case of different operating systems.
Installation and removal of a dual Operating system seems to be somewhat difficult. However doing so on a Virtual machine is just something like deleting a file.
Installed OS on a Virtual machine fails to load on failure of the primary Operating System. In dual booting both operating systems load independently. In a networking environment when the functioning applications are available on the network, the dual booting OS could work as backup in case the other crashes.
Summarizing Dual booting or Virtual Machine :
Virtual machine can be termed as developer machines used for testing.
VM’s use minimum machine resources so you can do multi tasking in the same primary operating system. Dual booting needs rebooting to switch the OS.
Virtual machine cannot work as back up OS as in the case of dual booting systems.
Configuring hardware is bit difficult in case of Virtual Machine’s. It is much easier to take benefit of hardware resources and install them too.
Recommended Virtual machines :
There are many free and paid virtual machine alternatives available. We have however shortlisted 3 of the VM’s. It depends on users requirements as to which VM would be useful.
1) VirtualBox from Oracle (Free Download)
2) Hyper V (Inbuilt in Windows 8)
3) VMware (Premium)
Virtual Box has always been developers charm for its ease of handling.
We hope this article puts an end to the query “Dual booting or Virtual Machine”.