My hard drive is formatted using EXT4. I have Virtual box installed in Linux Mint.
- It seems to me that since the hard drive format is incompatible with Windows I wouldn't be able to install Windows in a VM. Is this correct?
- Can a partition have a different format?
- Is it possible to install a VM on the hard drive as a Type I hypervisor along side Linux like you would use dual booting for 2 OS's on the same hard drive?
- If yes, how should the HDD or SSD be formatted or does it matter?
How is a Type I Hypervisor different than a virtual machine?
Thank you!
This is from my text book for a class I'm taking.
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1. Wrong. Whole point of virtualization is to emulate compatibility 100%, so what one OS can do - other MUST ALLOW(through emulation) or PASS THROUGH to real hardware. In other words, I had all sort of windows and as such windows partitions in VM container file on ext4 partition. Generally whole idea of VM container file, is that it acts like hardware to OS inside of VM. VM OS does not know nor cares it stores files in a file, as far as it is concerned - it is accessing drive directly.(by issuing SATA/PCI-E calls, that HOST catches and translates to read/write operations on VM container file).
2. Typically there is only one file system per partition. One drive can have MANY partitions, hence many file systems can be on same drive. They don't overlap. Example: if physically size of disk is A to D, then partition A to B can be one third and it will have its own file system. B to C will have one third and have its own filesystem that is different from A to B partition. Same goes C to D partition. Example: A ext4 B btrfs C fat32 D
3. Types of hypervisors are now irrelevant and obsolete from practical perspective, at least on Linux. KVM virtualisation is so good that it allows full pledge Linux run VM as dedicated host and/or do something else. Linux KVM is THAT GOOD.
On Linux KVM host you can pass through a partition or even whole drive to a gues VM, so guest VM will access partition/HDD and not know difference. That partition will be at mercy of Guest, Host wont manage nor touch it(unless explicetly forced by admin). So hypothetically it may even be possible to run OS from said partition or drive, assuming you can manage bootloader load from Gues partition. But in practicality it will be hard, due to difference in drivers in "guest mode" and "OS directly run" mode. Since Host does some driver emulation, like GPU emulation for example. As well you need to know UEFI well, which is pretty tough stuff on it's own.
In most cases VM guests read and write their data to VM containers like QCOW2 or somethin similar. Those containers are just files contained on Linux file system like BTRFS or Ext4 or XFS or something.
I avoided talking about LVM, it would just add extra complexity for no added benefit.
