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Recommendations For Home Virtualization?

Posted by kdawson on from the ganging-up dept.

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."

20 of 384 comments (clear)

  1. Give VirtualBox a try! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    http://www.virtualbox.org/

    1. Re:Give VirtualBox a try! by JWSmythe · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.
    2. Re:Give VirtualBox a try! by grub · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Trolling is a art,
    3. Re:Give VirtualBox a try! by FictionPimp · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Give VirtualBox a try! by JWSmythe · · Score: 4, Informative

          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.
    5. Re:Give VirtualBox a try! by Xtifr · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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!

    6. Re:Give VirtualBox a try! by HeronBlademaster · · Score: 3, Informative

      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 :)

  2. VitrtuaBox by mattver2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:VitrtuaBox by siride · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:VitrtuaBox by prefect42 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      +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.

      --

      jh

    3. Re:VitrtuaBox by MBGMorden · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
  3. Don't do it by timeOday · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    1. Re:Don't do it by bsDaemon · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  4. A few suggestsions by pehrs · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  5. Desktop virtualization? by hjf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Desktop virtualization? by gstoddart · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  6. Re:One acronym: KVM by suso · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  7. Virtualbox by mejustme · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  8. Re:In my experience, don't. by gbjbaanb · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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? :)

  9. Best thing I ever did by digitalhermit · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.