[QCLUG] Virtual Machines

[Aaron Johnson]

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Is there a way to make VirtualBox automatically start a VM on boot? I like
VirtualBox as it has very good performance but I've never been able to use
it as a server replacement for VMWare because I cannot find this feature
anywhere..

 

  _____  

From: qclug-bounces@qclug.org [mailto:qclug-bounces@qclug.org] On Behalf Of
Arron Lorenz
Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2008 11:52 PM
To: qclug@qclug.org
Subject: Re: [QCLUG] Virtual Machines

 

I've been using VirtualBox as a virtual server for my personal machine. I do
like the program over all. For an open source program it has very very close
performance to vmware server. Though cooper is correct vmware is still
faster. I would like to point out that vmware has released vmware server 2.0
beta http://www.vmware.com/beta/server/

It's run using Apache's tomcat appliance server. I do like it's completely
headless operation in windows and under linux (I'm using it on ubuntu). You
navigate/configure the vm from a web interface 127.0.0.1:8333\ui . The speed
over the web interface from across the internet is pretty responsive though
I would still use RDP for the connection to the vm.

On the downside the vm uses up it's allocated ram, but also the application
for me running in Firefox tends to be pretty ram intensive.


Well that's my 2 cents.
Arron





On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 10:39 PM, Chris Cooper <QCAdmin@gmail.com> wrote:

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
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-- 
From:
Arron James Lorenz
Reel to Reel Drive In
Reach Global Networks LLC
563-579-7046 


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