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."

Comments

Give VirtualBox a try!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.virtualbox.org/

Re:Give VirtualBox a try!

[JWSmythe]

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.

Re:Give VirtualBox a try!

[HeronBlademaster]

IMO if he wants to do that sort of thing, he should run Linux in VirtualBox on a Windows 7 host, and run Photoshop and friends on the host. Best of both worlds, right? That's what I do, except I use the Windows host mostly for gaming...

I also set up an OSX VM so I can write iPhone apps. I just posted a tutorial on setting that up on my blog; click my Homepage link to get there.

Re:Give VirtualBox a try!

[taintedkernel]

I run Lightroom and occasionally Photoshop on a 2k3 VM under VMWare without any issues. With a few gigs of ram it runs rather well, my biggest performance hit is that my photograph library & catalog is on an NFS share and not locally. PS/LR should be just fine on a VM.

Re:Give VirtualBox a try!

[Mark_Uplanguage]

I've set up all of my kids with Ubuntu Linux boxes running VirtualBox for Windows. Things to note, reverting to a saved state will lose ALL saved documents, files, etc. You need a link from Windows to a folder on Linux for your users so that important files aren't lost. There's another option to set up a 2nd HDD, which would be unaffected by reverting states, but I haven't done that - although the documentation is there. Because Photoshop and Lightroom are memory / performance hogs I'd set up a test linux partition and try it all out before committing. Depending on your needs for Linux a nice lightweight desktop instead of Gnome or KDE would be a smart move for the box running Photoshop. Good luck.

Re:Give VirtualBox a try!

[grub]

I'll second (or third, fourth, whatever) this.

I have VirtualBox on a new iMac with Ubuntu and WinXP VMs running just perfectly.

It's a really nice system. Much smaller than VMWare too.

Re:Give VirtualBox a try!

[FictionPimp]

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.

Re:Give VirtualBox a try!

[babyrat]

yes, that is what esx or esxi are.

Re:Give VirtualBox a try!

[TheLink]

Oops, just realized you have instructions on your homepage...
Doh.

Re:Give VirtualBox a try!

[JWSmythe]

    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

Re:Give VirtualBox a try!

[nschubach]

I consider myself fairly competent when it comes to computers/Linux/Windows and I was never able to get Xen to do anything but throw errors and waste hard drive space... things may have changed in the past year and a half or so since I tried, but VirtualBox is dead simple to create and manage VMs. (It has a GUI for one.)

Re:Give VirtualBox a try!

[Xtifr]

Linux VM on a Windows host? Isn't that like building a cement house on top of a wooden foundation? :)

If VirtualBox makes that an attractive solution, then perhaps investigating other options like VMWare is worth it!

Re:Give VirtualBox a try!

[HeronBlademaster]

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 :)

VitrtuaBox

[mattver2]

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.

Re:VitrtuaBox

[siride]

I've used a Windows XP VM on both Windows 7 as host and Linux. Works great in both, although it feels snappier in the Linux host. It's more than adequate for relatively recent hardware. It actually worked quite well back on my ThinkPad T43 (I have a T500 now) and that was without VT-x and friends.

Re:VitrtuaBox

[prefect42]

+1 for VirtualBox. Why you'd use ESX I have no idea. I'd probably second choice VMWare Server, which is also free and works equally well.

Re:VitrtuaBox

[jandrese]

I've been pretty happy with VirtualBox too, however, there is one big caveat: The 3D support is really fragmentary and doesn't really do much of anything useful yet. For Photoshop and Lightroom you might be able to get by for now, but those are the kind of apps that are on the cusp of using CUDA and related technologies to speed up processing in the future.

There are a couple of other caveats to it as well. It doesn't handle USB devices as nicely as VMWare (I was able to run USB EVDO cards from inside of a VM with VMWare for instance, and VirtualBox doesn't appear to have anything similar to that at all), and anything that requires a lot of I/O is going to suffer because that's where VMs always suffer.

Re:VitrtuaBox

[MBGMorden]

If your'e looking to have a specialized server that ONLY hosts VM's, then there is some merit to running ESXi. It's free too, and the resource footprint is pretty small. Personally, I would only use VirtualBox or VMWare Server in cases where I still wanted to use the machine running the VM's as a desktop in it's own right. Otherwise, ESXi is the way to go. That said, I DO use my home desktop to serve VM's in addition to regular desktop usage, so it runs Virtualbox :). I use ESXi for virtualizing servers at work though.

Re:VitrtuaBox

[jtdennis]

I use ESXi on a box at home to host about 6 VMs. the base OS is about 70MB so it's got a tiny footprint on the server and most of the resources go to the VMs. For a dedicated box it's a great solution. For running VMs on a computer that's doing more than that VirtualBox is great.

Re:VitrtuaBox

[Martin Blank]

I have three basic systems at home:

• An ESXi 4.1 host with 1.5TB of drive space, a Core i7 CPU, and 12GB of RAM
• A desktop system with similar specs running Windows 7 with VMWare Workstation 7
• A notebook with Core 2 Duo and 2GB primarily running Fedora 13 with VMWare Workstation 7

The desktop and notebook have usually one or occasionally two guests open. The ESXi host runs about a dozen guests simultaneously, including a fairly complete Windows 2008 R2 domain, a Linux server, a Linux workstation, and a Windows XP guest. A Windows 7 guest is also present, but isn't usually running, and I have test systems in place for various other OSes from Windows 2000 to Ubuntu to Damn Vulnerable Linux.

I have bogged it down when running a lot through it from time to time, but I was able to install eight Windows 2008 systems more or less simultaneously in under a day, patches and domain creation and joining included. I did learn that assigning appropriate memory to the virtual video cards is important, as the default 8MB drags until a remote desktop solution becomes available. The cost for the ESXi system came in at about $1000, including an Intel gigabit NIC, as ESXi doesn't recognize the onboard NIC in most desktop motherboards.

It might be more than what is being sought here, but it works well for me, and has dramatically reduced the clutter in my home office.

Re:Well

[Pojut]

That depends...do you want one that functions autonomously, or do you want a cardboard cutout?

See here for research****

****Note: Sarcasm

Don't do it

[timeOday]

You won't be happy scrolling around a big image within a VM - the graphics performance just isn't there. It will work OK, but you'll always wish you were running natively.

I use VMWare Workstation for much of each day to run MS Office Apps, and it's very useful - but no VM performs well graphically.

Re:Don't do it

[davidbrit2]

This. If you're doing heavy photo manipulation, virtualization isn't for you. Just put all your data on a separate drive so if you need to wipe/reinstall the OS, you won't lose anything important. Then you can also use the Previous Versions feature in Windows 7 to roll back any data files you accidentally hose.

Re:Don't do it

[bsDaemon]

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.

Re:Don't do it

[Omnifarious]

I would never ever do things that way. I'm setting this up for my gf, and the Windows virtual machine will be set up with no external network access of any kind. Having Windows as a host OS kills much of the benefit you get from virtualization.

Re:Don't do it

[nschubach]

Why would you put something that's a large target for viruses as a host? That doesn't make sense to me.

If you get a virus in Windows as a VM, you simply rollback to a previous state. You can't do that with a host as easily, and you lose the functionality of the PC while that's happening. If you run all your Windows machines in a VM, you can quickly switch to a backup copy without having to wait for some virus cleaner, disk defragmentation, system update that requires a reboot...

It just makes more sense to run a Linux host in most cases because of all the maintenance that happens in Windows systems.

A few suggestsions

[pehrs]

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.

Re:A few suggestsions

[Thinman]

You can use http://pve.proxmox.com/ for a KVM OpenVZ virtualization machine, management is web enabled and you could log to the machines by openVNC, somewhere there is a howto to enable SPICE for better multimedia integration.

If you could affored a Redhat Virtualization for Desktops it could be an interesting option as SPICE is enabled as default.

Regards.

Desktop virtualization?

[hjf]

You mean desktop virtualization? Do you need to run 2+ OSes at the same time? That's what virtualization is for. Or do you need to just suspend and restore states? You can get away with hibernation for that. Or do you mean go back in time to a known working configuration? Windows can do that (System Restore), but I don't really see why you would need that on your main machine. If you're trying stuff out, you should try it inside the VM anyway (you use Workstation or VirtualBox for that).

ESX is nice, but it's not what you think. You don't get a local console (last time I checked, anyway), you're supposed to access it from SSH or VNC. It also designed for datacenter stuff (like SAS disks and controllers. It doesn't support IDE for example). You're looking for VMWare Workstation (Paid) or VirtualBox (free for non-commercial use), which are pretty fast. Paravirtualization (ESX or XEN) will give ~98% speed on Linux (on a PV kernel) and Windows only works well if you use GPLPV drivers, otherwise is slow as hell.

I'd just recommemd you stay away from virtualization if you're just a desktop user. Unless you're trying out shareware/malware/stuff that can break your install. If you're upgrading, why not use the old machine to try ESX, XEN and other stuff and figure out yourself how you want to use it? Stick to dual-boot for now.

Re:Desktop virtualization?

[powerlord]

I'll second ESX being a SERVER VIRTUALIZATION ONLY. We use it at work, and it doesn't give you a "Desktop". You need to use RDC, or SSH (or direct connect through their Windows client) to get a desktop on the Virtual Machines.

As far as DESKTOP VMs solutions:
I just did a migration of my wife from her XP machine to a new Windows 7 machine (hey, she wants/needs it for her work, I'm happier with Linux/OSX, so to each their own :) ). As part of the migration I turned her old XP laptop into a VM, and installed it on her new Win7 machine w/VMWare Player which is FREE (as in beer), (although I hear VMWare Server is also now).

I've been using VMWare Fusion on my OSX installation and its been great (running both Linux and Windows), but I haven't done anything in terms of Photo work.

Since VMWare DOES have a FREE option to try it (their Converter and Player), you might want to give it a shot and see how well/poorly a VM will do what you want (I'd also suggest Converting the image to a USB drive so the image doesn't need to include a copy of itself :) ).

Re:Desktop virtualization?

[gstoddart]

I'd just recommemd you stay away from virtualization if you're just a desktop user.

I'd recommend the exact opposite.

Virtualization rocks for keeping things separate. My personal machine has a quad core CPU with 8GB of RAM. I've got 2-3 VMs running most of the time so I can keep things separated and do different things. It also lets me have Linux, FreeBSD and Windows guests without the power/space requirements of multiple machines.

VMWare workstation is only about $200 or so (maybe even $150), and I gather Server is free (but at the time running it on Vista 64 wasn't very easy). The ability to snapshot machines or sandbox things is really awesome. It also allows me to have multiple dev environments set up which don't interfere with each other, and a quick linked clone of a machine gives me a disposable test-bed in about 3 minutes if I think I need something new and isolated.

The only thing I regret is that my CPU is one notch down from being able to do 64-bit guests because I wasn't aware of that at the time.

For me, a big machine with loads of RAM and disk and VMWare makes for a really sweet setup. If you've got the resources on the box, it really does make some things easy. Soon I'll migrate my second physical box (an old XP machine) into a VM so I can keep some legacy software installs going without worrying about an aging machine.

the new ver's of Photoshop does use video cards

[Joe The Dragon]

the new ver's of Photoshop does use video cards for speed up. You can make images and save the VM over head and have the easy fall back.

In my experience, don't.

[BobMcD]

Your question gives me pause on a few different levels:

A) You're not familiar with this technology. This is probably not the best way to get indoctrinated with VM's.

B) Other options for 'ease of switching' exist, like a KVM, Wubi, etc. These are likely to give you a more satisfactory result.

C) "Performance does matter" - yeah, no. Nobody uses VM's to increase their performance. They use them to save money, increase density, etc.

The tech is cool and has a number of really novel applications, but 'home use' and 'performance' are probably not among them unless you're some kind of super nerd. And if you were, you'd be too busy trying things out to spend time asking slashdot... :)

Re:In my experience, don't.

[gbjbaanb]

A) You're not familiar with this technology. This is probably not the best way to get indoctrinated with VM's.

Quite the opposite. its how I always learned the ins, outs and plain 'don't do this again-ness' of various computer systems. The alternative is to read the documentation and find out what the manufacturer wanted you to learn.

Still, IO and Gfx performance is not something a VM is good at. Did I mention I also learn a lot by reading slashdot? :)

Re:One acronym: KVM

[suso]

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.

VMWare rocks for video

[FranTaylor]

I'm running 64-bit linux host with VMware Workstation and a Windows XP guest.

Performance all around is very very good. If you full screen the guest, you can't tell that it's running virtual unless you check for the VMware icon.

Video performance is OUTSTANDING, essentially native. Netflix videos play full screen with very little CPU overhead.

Suspend and resume can be slow if your guest has lots of RAM.

I recommend using XFS for the filesystem containing your VMware images. I've tried other filesystems but nothing can touch XFS when it comes to handling those enormous virtual disk files.

Virtualbox

[mejustme]

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.

Re:VirtualBox

[SunSpot505]

Second Virtual Box, however..... OP may want to note that there is limited graphics drivers support. I am able to run Photoshop CS3 in my Win XP VB install, however I would caution recommending it if you (both) use it professionally and do things that rely on GPU acceleration. VB does support pass-through 2d and 3d support, but I'm not sure how to enable that, the option has always been grayed out for me. I run AMD, you may need nVidia drivers. I have heard rumblings too that Windows after XP doesn't work so swell due to the way windows validates its key at startup. Do your research, but this may be a problem for you too.

Hardware wise, I recommend a quad core and at least 6-8 gb of RAM. You can get by with a dual-core and 4gb, and I did for years, but the price of an amd quadcore is so low these days, there's no excuse not to.

Re:VirtualBox

[springbox]

I have the option to enable both on an AMD computer with a Radeon card. You might possibly have a configuration problem.

Re:One acronym: KVM

[MightyMartian]

KVM isn't perfect, and does lack some of the polish and features of products like Xen and VMWare, but in raw performance it kicks serious ass. However, it is not as easy as Virtualbox, so for home or desktop virtualization, VirtualBox gets my vote.

Re:One acronym: KVM

[Bert64]

Take a look at proxmox (http://www.proxmox.com), it provides a simple to install distribution bundled with kvm and a gui to manage it from...

It's aimed at server virtualisation which doesn't seem to be what the original poster wanted, but then he mentioned vmware esx which is also a server oriented hypervisor so who knows.

a simple answer

[carlosap]

Dont do it. And dont ask. Photoshop will always use all avaiable power, and thats good, fast rendering, etc. If your time is like gold dont vm it

Best thing I ever did

[digitalhermit]

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.

Tips based on my experience

[maxxjr]

I have done something similar. Some points. 1. First pay attention to what CPU you get. Some Intel CPU's do not support VT extensions. Most AMD CPU's do. 2. I have always found better performance if the VM virtual disks were on their own disks vs. the OS, and then vs. each other, if possible. 3. I have used Photoshop on a Windows VM with VMware Workstation, and did not see graphics performance issues as described. VMware workstation is not free, but is not too $$$, and has some nice features vs. the free options from VMware. 4. Lots of RAM!!! 5. If you use an option like VirtualBox or VMware workstation that runs on top of an OS, I preferred and went with a Linux Host over Windows, mainly due to stability and CONTROL. Once installed, I did not do ANYTHING with or to the host OS. If I needed Linux, I would run a Linux VM. I also used a lighter window manager (XFCE) for host OS, removed unneeded services, etc. 6. I did run Samba and NFS on the Host OS to share files between.

Re:VitrualBox

[rwa2]

VirtualBox works very well using Linux as a host, plus you get experimental DirectX/OpenGL acceleration support... (VMware Workstation charges extra for that, though I have no idea how well it actually works)

ESX is for enterprises running servers. You'll be missing out on a lot of hardware support, just to gain a few extra MB of RAM (cheap!) and a few CPU cycles. Also it's a pain :P

Last I checked a few months ago, VMware Workstation / Server on Linux still uses a file on disk to back the virtual machine's memory. This will kill your file I/O performance on your host, since these huge files are constantly being written to. There's a workaround involving moving this to tmpfs, but of course then your virtual machines use twice as much RAM. Anyway, I've been pretty disappointed in VMware ever since they got consumed by EMC^2.

But frankly, virtualization is kinda last year... physicalization is the buzzword now. Get a cheap cluster of ION-based nettops to host all your various servers, and filesystems, and stuff 24x7, and dual boot your beefy application desktops depending upon what game you're trying to play or application you're trying to run... I think you'll be much happier and free to tinker.

Performance for what?!!

[JoelWink]

I initially read this comment as "I am heavily into pornography."

Re:WHO CARES ABOUT REDHAT ???

[GPLHost-Thomas]

Would you mind elaborating a bit? FYI, I'm the person maintaining xen-qemu-dm in Debian thanks to the help of people from Citrix and Intel, and I've been in touch with Jeremy quite few times, so I think I know what I'm talking about.

Re:No it doesn't

[Richard W.M. Jones]

KVM beats Xen on performance nowadays. Take a closer look at a recent version.