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Recommendations For Home Virtualization?
An anonymous reader writes "I'll have to upgrade my home computers sometime in the next few months and I'm thinking it's time to swallow the virtualization pill. Besides the ease of switching between Windows and Ubuntu, I'm looking mainly for the ability to save machine state in order to be able to revert to a known working state. Googling turns up mostly guides from 2009 and earlier. Is VMWare ESX pretty much the way to go? Performance does matter — not for gaming but I am heavily into photography, so apps like Lightroom and Photoshop need to run well. Thanks for any insight."
I have used VirtualBox quite a bit and I find it completely satisfactory. I have run both Win XP on Ubuntu hosts and Ubunutu on Win XP hosts and it has always worked very well. http://www.virtualbox.org/ I think it would do everything you want.
For stable server virtualization vmWare ESXi is pretty much the king at the moment, unless you want to pay an insane amount. It's free (as in beer) stable, easy to manage, fast and scalable. Sadly the management tools are windows only, I highly recommend it, if you have suitable hardware.
For workstations it's a bit less clearcut. Generally you want a primary OS in your workstation where you do most of your work, and secondary OS that you boot up in a virtualized environment. The three primary choises are KVM, XEN and OpenVS. They all have performance penalties, and I am not aware of any clear cut advantage for any of the three. I would suggest you go with what is default in your favourite linux distribution, as maintaining virtualization infrastructure isn't an especially fun task.
RHEL6 dumping Xen is actually a mistake. Not that KVM is bad, but Xen is actually really good and works well in production. The community is at fault for not trying to do more to integrate Xen into the kernel better.
But such is the way with open source. Dump a working solution in favor of an up and coming newbie with its own set of problems.
More specifically, the PUEL edition of VirtualBox directly from the VirtualBox web site. Don't bother with the version available through the app repository. VirtualBox is great at releasing bug fixes every 1 or 2 months, the PUEL edition will give you all the extra bits like USB and 2D/3D acceleration. I left the various VMWare products behind many years ago and migrated to VirtualBox both at home and at work, and today I still think I made the right decision.
You're right in principle, however if he uses Windows as the host OS, then he can run his image software natively, then run Linux in the VM.
I agree, VirtualBox is a lot easier to set up and run, is easy to maintain, and easy to move images between machines. It's what I've been recommending to everyone for a while now.
He wants to run Photoshop and Lightroom in it though. I don't know how well that does with the virtualized video cards on any platform though. I know there are a lot of games I can't play in a virtualized environment, only for that reason. If I could, I wouldn't have a real Windows bootable partition at all.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I'm running multiple VM systems including VMWare Server, VMWare ESX, VMWare Workstation, xen, KVM and VirtualBox.
VMWare Server is going away and sort of a pain to manage. However, it was free and worked decently. I have since replaced it with VMWare Workstation on my desktop and laptop systems. I use VirtualBox on my Mac laptop because it's free and was the easiest/cheapest to get going.
On my servers I am running VMWare ESX, xen and KVM on AMD systems (mostly dual core, but a couple quad core systems in the mix).
VMWare ESX was the most finicky as to installation but has been pretty simple to manage. The remote console options are simple. The VSphere management client is Windows only though. There is support for command line administration, but it's somewhat of a bear. You can script around it though and many people have done so and provide scripts online. Check out the VMWare community pages. Support is so so..
Xen was my workhorse for the longest time, but since my primary OS is RedHat/CentOS and RH is moving towards KVM, I've also been moving to KVM. The GUI management tools work fine, but are not as polished as VMWare ESX. However, it very much makes up for it in being able to do just about everything from the command line. I can deploy an image with a single command and this works wonderfully for testing. Performance is awesome with both xen and KVM. Well, the caveat is that some network intensive stuff seems to be bottlenecking somewhere, but it only has a single gigabit NIC across 8 VMs. I'll be adding another NIC in the next couple weeks and either bonding the adapter or just splitting them up.
Be aware that client/guest images generally do not have video acceleration so many games will fail to load. If you're running VMWare Workstation on a laptop, or the more recent KVMs then there is some measure of acceleration, but not 100%. Also, sound can be finicky especially across the network.
Use the export function. This will export the VM in OVF format, which is a portable format you can move to anywhere, even to vmware.
Export then import. It's easy.
I made an image for someone on my Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit machine, so they could use it on their Mac. I exported it, they imported it, and everything ran flawlessly. They were delighted.
And yes, you can run a machine from the command line. I have OpenVPN Access Server in a virtual machine running on my Linux server. OpenVPN Access Server didn't want to run natively on one of my physical server, so I stuck it in a box. :) Xorg is not running on the server (for obvious reasons), so it just starts at boot time with: /opt/VirtualBox/VBoxHeadless -startvm OpenVPN
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
If I weren't a PC gamer, I would certainly do it the other way around (Linux host, Windows VM). The reality of PC gaming is such that I have little choice in the matter.
I used to dual-boot as a solution, but it got tiring having to reboot all the time. Running a Linux VM on a Windows host instead gets me exactly what I need: access to both arbitrary games and arbitrary linux tools without having to reboot :)