VirtualBox

There are several available platform virtual machines available. I generally use the Sun VirtualBox. I usually run a Linux server in my Windows-running laptop, using a virtual hard disk for it and accessing it with PuTTY and WinSCP.

VirtualBox is able to run a virtual machine also without an output terminal/window (headless). I use this for my Linux server.

Another possibility it offers is to run a machine booting from a real partition instead of a virtual hard disk. However this makes things quite difficult and is an experimental feature. The hardware found by the operating system will be different in a virtual box and booting as host, so this will lead to several problems. For example I was unable to run a deployed Vista from Linux and I could only run a deployed Ubuntu in Windows with command line interface.

Homepage: http://www.virtualbox.org/

Developer: Sun

Version: 3.0.6 (September 9, 2009)

Platform: Cross-platform