[GTALUG] Virtualized OSes

[Giles Orr]

I've been using VirtualBox a lot recently, and I've been pretty
impressed with it - running more than one simultaneous machine,
setting up an internal network and running ansible between them,
nifty.  Today at work we had an interesting discussion about Digital
Ocean: the suggestion was made (and undoubtedly it's obvious to many
on this list, but it was eye-opening to me, I'm still getting my head
around disposable machines) that if you weren't sure an upgrade to a
droplet would work, just clone it, do the upgrade on the clone and see
how it goes.  Then you can make your decision and destroy the unwanted
version.  All of which made me think "wouldn't it be cool if I could
have a system with an totally stripped Linux with VirtualBox as the
"Window Manager" so I could toggle between two or three running OSes
with graphical interfaces ..."  So:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system-level_virtualization_implementations

I've already ruled out OpenVZ as it looks like all virtualized systems
have to use the same kernel.  Xen seems like the optimal method, but I
seem to remember that your processor specifically has to support
virtualization ("lscpu" says, among other things, "Virtualization:
VT-x", so I'm covered?)

Assuming I want the base OS (does that term even apply?) to be Linux,
and I don't like proprietary software, what's the "best choice" if I
want to simultaneously run things like Debian Jessie, TinyCore,
SliTaz, and possibly even Windows 7?

Links to good tutorials and "Getting Started" guides would also be
very much appreciated.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com