This week Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, announced a partnership with Parallels, maker of the Virtualization products Parallels Workstation and Parallels Desktop for Mac. This article compares four virtualization products available for Linux: the free, open source x86 emulator Qemu; the closed-but-free versions of VirtualBox and VMware-Server, and the commercial Parallels Workstation.
Where’s Xen it this summary? I thought it is kinda important virtualization technology.
And KVM?
Both Xen and KVM should be there. I don’t particularly like either one because they are too big a pain to get working correctly, but nonetheless, they should be there since, of course, my opinion of them matters very little.
By picking one, they can concentrate upon polishing the tools so that the one they choose is *not* “too big a pain to get working correctly” in their distro. I feel the same way about desktop environments. Getting the tools and distro integration right requires great time and effort. A distro should not try to support all DEs or virtualization tools equally. They should pick one and do their very best with it. And then let their results compete against other distros which have made different choices.
i agree. i use VB and outta the box it worked like a charm for me. my WinXp was online right away. i have Vista as well, but i think it needs to be setup beyond Xp does in order to go online for me. But i dont care about it that much. I”m new to Virtualization and i love it. i have yet to test out VMWAre.
I was talking about the article reviewing virtualization options for Linux, not Canonical’s choice to include KVM into their distro. I agree that they should chose one option, and if the choice was Xen vs. KVM, I think they made the right choice. That is not what I was talking about though.
Of course. My appologies. I saw your post over in the “Recent Comments” list and made the assumption that it was under the other story. And you know what they say about when you assume. 😉
Qemu can utilize KVM if it’s available, and KVM utilizes Qemu userspace tools, so it’s kind of one and the same from the user experience POV.
Having used both, I’d say virtualbox still wins, but that’s just me.
His test box is a P4 2.6GHz, afaik Xen won’t work with it because the processor doesn’t have the VT extensions.
At least that’s the error message I got when I tried to use it.
VirtualBox has an open source edition, basically identical to the closed version, but without a few features such as USB and RDP access.
Call me a slave for pain but I like to use Qemu for my virtualization needs. Sure the command line can be a bit tricky but what I did was find out the commands that work for various settings (i.e. -hda c or -cdrom) and then create a cheat sheet in in a word processor. Now if I need to boot an image I copy and paste from the cheat sheet, change the image name, and I’m good to go. Qemu is great for booting iso files of live cd’s and its fairly light weight.
This review did get my curious about virtualbox though and I’ll try installing it this weekend. Who knows, I may like it more than Qemu if it can boot iso’s and is updated often. Unfortunately Qemu updates are not that frequent.
I’d recommend Virtual Box. It really feels fast, especially once you install the Guest Additions on it. And its gui is really nice.
It even has a couple of neat tricks up its sleeve like changing the guest OS resolution when you resize the virtual box window.
I tried virtualbox last night. I couldn’t figure out how to run the XO laptop image so I downloaded the damn small linux iso. Took me a few minutes to realize I had to add the ISO then set up a hardware profile for it. After that I got the iso running and I was impressed with virtualbox and the speed it has.
I just made shell scripts, and can then clone them if I create more guests.
To run Windows XP on my machine in KVM, I just type “winxp.”
This remains the achilees heel of VM systems, how well do they handle 3D acceleration.
Well, how do they?
AFAIK, the only one of those that has any 3D support on Linux is VMWare, and even then it’s an unstable alpha implementation only available by editing config files.
I didn’t try any of these on linux but did try to run linux in virtual machines with windows xp as the host OS (i have a feeling that things would work a little bit better when running xp inside linux but i didn’t try this yet)
My conclusion is that the Virtual Box is the winner for me.
-Parallels workstation couldn’t even boot xubuntu 7.10 (X11 refused to start after trying to change screen resolution few times).
-Qemu worked fine out of the box but too slow. I used the Qemu Manager Version 4.0 for setting up the environment and DID turn the kqemu support in the manager but it was rendering windows so slow that i am not shore if the qemu manager turned kqemu support at all (if it did, then qemu is useless for me)! Used xubuntu 7.10 as the guest os.
-VMWare. I tested it using ubuntu 7.04. Had some problems with installing the “guest tools”. Some modules just wouldn’t compile (after installing all needed tools). After I installed the tools partially (video driver was ok), i had problem with setting the screen resolution. I have the 1440×900 screen but driver supported 1400*1000! So after some manual X configuration full screen was still not working (only 50% of the screen was visible) but solved this with monitor auto configuration button
. Apps in vmware felt a bit luggish, didn’t seem near native for me (firefox with few tabs opened).
And finally Virtual Box. It worked out of the box, installed the add-ons easily. X worked well out of the box, networking also (vmware was good in this segment, too). Best performance and easiest to use in my opinion. Still not “near native” when it comes to drawing windows. Guest os was xubutnu 7.10
All the above are tested on the athlon xp 1.5ghz with 1gb ddr ram (working at slow frequency) with geforce FX 5200 128mb. Didn’t use hardware virtualization of my CPU because it supports none
(vmware, parallels and virtual box all support these). VMs had 384-512mb of ram.
Hope this helps.