virtualization - 1 PC, 2 consoles (as in 2 monitors, keyboards and mice)

I have this desire to "kill 2 birds with one shot". Currently, I have 1 server running round the clock, 1 laptop that runs about 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, and a desktop that runs about the same length of time. All 3 are ... old, to say the least. So there is a great need to upgrade (well, the server might handle its job for another year or so, but that only depends on how much time I have to put it to "work").

Now, I'm "dreaming" of only one PC. I'm thinking vmware's ESX. So there will be a VM for the server, a VM for the "laptop" and one for the "desktop". And obviously I'll have to somehow "link" a set of monitor/keyboard/mouse with one of the laptop/desktop VMs. The server doesn't need such things, obviously (it doesn't have them at this moment either).

Is something like this possible? ESX is not a requirement, it's just something I found that answers part of my problems, but there still remains the 2 KVM set that needs connecting and "linking" to appropriate VM.

Why I would want to do this? well, first of all, it's much cheaper to upgrade one PC than 3. Then, the power consumption is obviously lower. Plus the extra space.Plus it allows me to better separate networks and services.

Thanks.

Answer

Finally, I managed to get my desired setup working. Partially, but the concept works.

The answer is indeed a hypervisor (like vmware ESXi which I use) and the actual answer I needed is VMDirectPath or generically: PCI passthrough (VT-d, on the intel platform (which I use))

The problem for this setup is that in order to passthough the video card to a VM, besides having a passthrough capable maainboard AND processor, you also need a special set of these (at least for vmware). There is a dedicated thread for this subject over on vmware: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/297072?start=0&tstart=0 Be sure to read that BEFORE buying any hardware for such a setup.

My personal setup right now is to use an USB VGA "card". So I have all K,V,M on USB now. The only annoying problem I still have is that when the VM boots up, the default video adapter is the virtual one, so I have to login the vsphere client (form another PC) and switch around the adapters. I'm currently looking at some automated way of doing this and I think I'll find something eventually (worse case scenario, I record a macro :) ). After removing the default vmware adapter, all is ok now.