[QCLUG] Virtual Machines

[Chris Cooper]

So as to not hijack a perfectly good thread on partition sizes, I
decided to post anew some thoughts on the Virtualbox comments brought
up.

I have recently had a chance to do more research on virtual machines
for work, and inside Ubuntu, From my experience VMWare server performs
slightly better than virtualbox after you install vmware-tools on the
guest-OS.  While not open source, it is free from www.vmware.com.  The
VMWare-tools are deffinately a MUST on the guest.  Without the proper
VMware mouse and video driver installed, performance is sluggish at
best.

If you have a processor that supports the virtualization flag, it can
make a huge performance gain for a 64-bit guest OS.  However, it seems
to slow down XP VM's under 7.10.  More info on the flag can be found
here: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/linux/linux-tip-how-to-tell-if-your-processor-supports-vt/

It is important to note that as of this time, VMWare doesn't have much
if any support for virtualizing your 3D card, so trying to game inside
a VM isn't real practical.  For that, I would stick with wine and
cedega.  This also means you may notice a big slow down in a Vista VM
if you have the Aero interface on.  It seems to run decently well with
it disabled, though.

Another fun use for VM's is trying out Live CD's.  I am constantly
downloading different Live cd's for various things, so I created a
small VM with no hard drive, that I use for trying out a live cd
before I burn it.  CD-R's are cheap, but it still takes a fair amount
of time to burn and reboot just to see what is inside.

As for Xen, it doesn't really compete on the same level as Virtualbox
and VMware server.  Xen is probably one of the fastest of all the
virtual machine apps, but it is a hypervisor (a lightweight linux
distro who's sole function is to host VM's), and can't be run inside
your main environment.  It is restricted to 64-bit processors only,
and doesn't provide access to the guest VM's from it's console, since
it is command line only.  However, for hosting multiple VM's on one
server, it is great.  VMware offers their ESX hypervisor, which has a
better tool set, but isn't as efficient at Xen as sharing resources
over multiple VM's.

TechThrob had a really nice write up comparing VMware Server,
Virtualbox, Qemu and Parallels. It lacks some heavy tech specs, but is
good reading for people just getting into the whole virtual machine
thing.
http://www.techthrob.com/tech/linux_virtualization.php

--Cooper