One of the first choices to be made when installing any Linux distribution is whether the system will be single or multiboot. In general, many developers run both Windows and Linux on the same machine. In some cases, due to licensing restrictions or just personal preference, they wish to use the Windows installation that came with their computer and boot into one or the other as needed. This is perfectly fine, and most bootloaders will recognize both operating systems and provide menu items to boot the desired one. Another option is to use Xen or similar virtualization software to boot both simultaneously. A third choice is to run Windows under a Linux virtual machine (VM) using QEMU or KVM software. Creating VMs under QEMU, KVM, Xen, or any other virtualization software (such as VMware), would be a complete book in itself. For our purpose, we will consider a VM as essentially equivalent to an actual hardware system, since the issues outside VM creation are identical.
Best practice, if this is a single operating system server environment, will be a single-boot system. If this is a developer system that may require booting into an alternative operating system, use dual boot.
VM generally does not require dual boot.
