[mdlug] Creating virtual machines

[David McMillan]

     So, here's my situation:  a few weeks ago, my company-issued laptop 
(a multi-boot system with Ubuntu and XP Pro SP3) was stolen from my 
vehicle (in Canada, no less -- and they say Canada is safer, hah!).  
Fortunately for me, I had recently made a complete copy of the hard 
drive to an external USB drive using dd.  I should note that this was a 
straight of=if copy, with no compression or conversion of the original 
to a file.
     Now, the WinXP side of this laptop had quite a bit of setup work 
done on it that would be tiresome to repeat, not to mention quite a bit 
of software that can be expected not to run well (or at all) on my new 
laptop, which (when it arrives) will be running Windows 7 (but will be a 
dual-boot Win/Linux machine as soon as I get my hands on it).
     So, my thought is, I *ought* to be able to create a VM from the 
copy of the stolen laptop's WinXP partition.  But aside from a bit of 
messing about with VMWare, I haven't got any experience in this area.  
Ideally, I'd like to create a VM that can be stored in my multi-access 
partition, and run from inside either Win7, or from Linux, so I don't 
have to reboot to access the VM when I need it.  So a multi-platform VM 
hosting system is essential, and of course the more Open-Source the better.
     So, before I start thrashing about blindly, here's my list of 
questions:

     1.  What's the best (loaded question, I know) open-source VM 
hosting system that runs under XP, Win7, and Linux well, and doesn't 
have any trouble hosting any of those OSs?
     2.  How does one go about creating a VM from a drive image of an 
existing "hard" WinXP computer?  My only experience with VMs previously 
has been creating fresh VMs from scratch using an OS install disk.  I 
know that XP can mulish over being transferred to new hardware, but I'm 
hoping there's a howto of sorts for getting around this.
     3.  Are there any known problems running 32-bit VMs under a 64bit 
host OS?  My new machine will be my first foray into 64bit operations.
     4.  The new machine will have a quad-core processor.  Any 
experiences to relate regarding optimizing VMs for running on 
multi-core?  I've heard that cores can be "dedicated" to VMs to avoid 
bogging the system down, but it's not a subject I've researched yet in 
any degree of detail.