Weblog entry #154 for ajt
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Virtual Box is great except when it blows up. I can't use it one system because of bug #505281 which is a real pain...
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Given the choice of starting from fresh, a clean install on a new workstation/server, which VM solution would you choose?
I've tried and quite liked Xen, I've used VMWare reasonably extensively in production, but I dislike the idea of depending on tomcat for the new server 2.x releases. I've been told VirtualBox is also nice to use, and similar to the VMWare server 1.x series, but I'm also quite tempted by the "native and built-in" nature of KVM, although I've never actually found the time to try it.
Given a fresh start, which way would you go?
Just wondering, and looking for persuasion one way or another I suppose...
Cheers.:wq
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
I started with Qemu/kqemu which is nice and fast and worked okay, but the interface is Spartan and I found some operating systems were not so happy with it.
I then thought I'd try Xen as it's the VM of the moment but there were no AMD64 Xen kernels in Lenny for months at a time so I've never actually used it yet. I now have a Xen Dom0 kernel but I've never used it yet.
Around the same time as I was using Qemu and planning Xen I thought I'd try out VirtualBox. VirtualBox like Xen can take advantage of AMD/Intel CPUs with virtualisation built-in but doesn't require it so it was easy to tinker with on my older AMD64 system than KVM which I also considered.
VirtualBox has a nice GUI but unlike Qemu can't run headless, it needs an X display (though you can fool it with xvfb). It's dead easy to set up and use. Windows after Me and 2K work like a charm in the VM and so far every version of Debian and CentOS I've thrown at it just work. With the right VM client driver software installed (Win2K or later and most recent Linuxes) it's a year joy to use. I've even had it running OpenSolaris for a while until I borked the install!
I'd say that Virtual box is a great desktop VM suite, it's plenty fast enough and dead easy to configure and use. I believe that some of the others may be technically better but I can't comment as I only use one VM client at a time and only now and then not all the time.
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
Thanks for the info, it's always good to hear from people who actually use things like this, rather than just read reviews etc.
The VirtualBox dependency on X will probably be a kicker for me from a proper production side of things, but I think I'll probably still give it a go for some lighter-weight desktop VM'ing
Thanks again.:wq
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
The commercial version can be run without X and has other extra bits. It is possible to run the open-source edition in a virtual X frame-buffer as I do but it's clearly intended to be used as a desktop tool - and it's very good at doing that.
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]