I just learned that Citrix released a Release Candidate of their Client Hypervisor. I noticed my laptop, a Dell Latitude E6500, is compatible with XenClient, and decided to set up a home lab.
I burned the ISO to a CD, attached an external USB SATA drive to the E6500, and fired up the installer. The installation went very smoothly, and it was able to leave my SSD and other SATA-drive (both of which contain my regular Windows 7 installation) alone.
Now I’ve got this dual-boot scenario with Windows 7 (on the SSD, data on the integrated SATA drive) and the XenClient hypervisor (on the external USB SATA drive). I didn’t even need the documentation :). While burning the ISOs of XenClient and Windows 7 (32-bit), I spent a couple of minutes watching the videos.
I spend an hour or so creating and configuring virtual machines with various settings:
On my other laptop, a Zepto Znote 6324W, I installed the latest version of XenServer to host the XenClient Synchroniser. With the E6500 booted to Windows, I installed XenCenter and imported the Synchronisor into XenServer. Also, I installed a Windows 7 (32-bit) VM so I could test the Synchroniser. More on that later.
Does your E6500 have vt-d. I attempted this on multiple machines, all supporting vt-d but not vt-d. I understand the benefits of vt-d but was surprised that without it, I could not get it to work.
Criminal: my laptop has both VT-d and VT-x, which are requirements for XenClient.
error: I meant they supported vt-x but not vt-d.