Boot a physical machine directly from a virtual image

I have been searching for a way to boot a physical machine from a virtual image (.vhd or .vmdk). I found solutions using the loader that Microsoft provides with windows 7, but that is not of much real help to me because we will not be using windows.

There was a software called VBoot that claimed to do it, but apparently it only works on NTFS file system (which doesn't make it any more useful the Microsoft's loader).

The bigger picture is to natively boot many physical machines using virtual images, but if I'm able to work out booting even a single machi开发者_如何学JAVAne, the other things can be done.

Are you talking about a hypervisor?

VMWare's ESXi is a free to use bare metal hypervisor that would make this possible. Xen is another type 1 hypervisor based on Linux (a privileged Linux guest called dom0 manages the hypervisor), also free.

EDIT: Here's the link to ESXi, now called vSphere: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2010/07/introducing-vmware-sphere-hypervisor-41-the-free-edition-of-vmware-vsphere-41.html