I want to switch to Xen and guest Vm's

I just got my ASUS G74SX-A2 and my purpose with this awesome machine (since I have all the RAM 16gb and 2 disks) is to run Xen hypervisor, then install multiple guest VMs under it, one Windows (the pre-installed version)' and the others mostly Unix variants. First, how do I get the Windows system discs and all the necessary drivers ? Will Asus send them to me? I am reading that you can't use the recovery disk to set up my Windows guest Vm. Are there any other issues I need to know about? Has anyone done this and has a nice tutorial?

 

G73/74/53 Series Driver and Application Reference
Here you can get the lastest drivers, Win 7 Universal Disk, and Original Driver disks. Note the site has been slow recently for D/L and Chastity is working on it. Asus will send them but I believe there is a charge.
You can also try the vendor you purchased from, they should have at least sent a driver disk.

 

Now, "maybe" Citrix does something different than VMware, but I don't think you're going to get much out of Windows as a guest VM. For instance, you're asking for the drivers for Windows but, in a VMware environment, you don't normally have an opportunity to install the drivers for the actual hardware. Instead, what you install are VMware Tools, which is a set of drivers for the virtual hardware that is presented to the guest VM by the hypervisor.

My recommendation would be something like VMware Workstation (or a Citrix equivalent if there is one). If you want to go the free route, there is VMware Player or VirtualBox.

For instance, I have Windows 7 as my base OS. I then open two instances of VMware Player - one has ESXi installed and another has FreeNAS installed. This setup is somewhat similar to how a production environment is setup (albeit way smaller and simpler). ESXi then hosts a Windows Server 2008 VM and a Windows 7 VM where I can play around with Active Directory stuff.

My first "layer", where I have ESXi and FreeNAS, could have been any variety of guest OSes... but I always have Windows as my base OS for gaming and everyday use.

EDIT - Another thing, if you install the hypervisor as the bare metal OS, you're not going to be able to login at that machine. You have to login remotely (at least, this is true in a VMware environment... I'm not too familiar with the specifics of Citrix but I can't imagine they're very different).

 

+1 for VirtualBox over a win7 install.