Multiple OS simultaneously

Question

I want to use multiple OS, but I don't know how. Currently I have four different OS:

• Ubuntu
• Windows
• Mint
• Mac OSX

I use Ubuntu as my main OS, Windows for gaming (e.g. GTA 5), Mint and Mac OSX for work. Sometimes I want to use 2 at the same time, e.g. I'm doing some work on Ubuntu and want to download some games on Windows, or want to work on 2 OS at the same time.

At the moment I have all 4 natively installed and everything works fine, but I can't use them together.

So my question now:
Is it possible to use multiple OS at the same time?

My first approach was to use the second one with VMware and a VM with a physical hard drive but I didn't get that working.

My second thought was to use Hypervisor and install all 4os as VMs but I don't know if I can game with that without any lags.

It also would be cool to have one OS per monitor.

My specs (if it's necessary I can buy new parts):

• Intel i5-4690
• 16GB Ram
• Asrock H97M Pro4
• Nvidia GTX 760
• 3 Monitors

Answer 1

The best solution [& only one that breaks no EULAs] is to start with a Mac.

Install the other OSes as VMs, but also 'share' the Windows VM with a Boot Camped version of the same install. That way you can use it in VM when speed is not at a premium & reboot to it when it is.

You would need a big Mac Pro, at least a 2010/2012 5,1 12-core Xeon & I'd recommend at least 64GB RAM, to be able to work with little to no slowdown. You can pick them up on eBay these days for under 2 grand (pounds/euros/dollars) [I have one here, doing pretty much what you are asking]
Your i5 would be nowhere near up to the task, even if we ignore EULA.

Running all as VMs it would then be trivial to assign one to each of 4 screens. If you used Parallels in 'Coherence' mode then you can have any app on any screen without caring which OS it belongs to. They will all just look like they're part of the Mac.

A nice little trick if you need to do heavy processing, like compiling, is to also run a Mac OS VM, assign it half your core count. Then it can compile at full speed without slowing down the native Mac at all.

Answer 2

Tetsujin alrwady has a nice answer, but to expand a bit on it:

So my question now: Is it possible to use multiple OS at the same time?

Yes, you can do that. Using virtualisation options you can use a type-2 hypoervisor like vmware fusion, vmware workstation, wmware player, Parallels, virtualbox, ... In all these cases you run on OS as core, and on top of that you run another OS similar to how you run a normal program. Usually these OS's see 'fake' hardware, emulated on the the real host. Performance is good but do not expect direct access to a dedicated videocard nor stellar 3D performance.

(In fact, my experience is that any 3D game will bluescreen the host. Tested w7/vmware8).

Alternatiovely you can skip the whole host OS. You do not need a full OS with tons of bloatware to run an hypervisor. The leaner your core the less overhead and fewer things which can go wrong. This leads to type-1 hypervisors. Example of that are vmware ESX and Xen.

And though not trivial, you can pass though PCI-e cards to an OS. This is usually used to run hardware RAID cards and 10Gbit NICs directly from a virtualised fileserver etc, but for gaming you can do the same with a GPU.

Note that this will not work with any GPU, there are some limit (iirc. the summary is to use old Nvidia card, or AMD cards. Something to do with an ioMMU. I cannot be any clearer since I still want to do this myself and my research is not complete).

Also note that running OSX on a hackingish is not legal, so you would need to start with mac hardware. And apple is producing lots of fancy phones and laptops, but desktops and servers have ont been refreshed in quite a while. Thus it might make sense to use a dedicated machine for the OSx part.