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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."

8 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 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.

    2. 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.
  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 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.