Ask Slashdot: Which Virtual Machine Software For a Beginner?

An anonymous reader writes "I am getting ready to start learning the use of virtual machines. What VM software would you recommend? This is for personal use. It would be good to run both Windows VMs and Linux VMs. Early use would be maintaining multiple Windows installs using only one desktop computer with plenty of cores and memory. I would be starting with a Windows host, but probably later switching to a Linux host after I learn more about it. Free is good, but reliability and ease of use are better. What is your preferred choice for a VM beginner? VMware? Xen? VirtualBox? Something else?" It may also be helpful if you can recommend particular VM software for particular uses, or provide some insight on different hosting options.

Comments

What the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

It's software. Look at the menu options and read the manual if you need a reference.

Can you not think?

Re:What the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

+1.

  Really? A discussion is not required for this

Re:What the fuck

[Zapotek]

Why is parent modded at -1? Seriously, just look around and play with them wtf?

Re:What the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

You fucking piece of shit!

Thanks to YOUR comment, I shot a gigantic fart out of my very own asshole! That's right, due to none other than your pathetic little comment, a fart was expelled from MY ASSHOLE!

Turn to dust and die now!

Re:What the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, wtf is up with Slashdot these days? This is truly scraping the bottom now.

Re:What the fuck

[Tim12s]

Apparently the attention span of the average geek has dropped below 130 to approx 95. Instead of showing us a machine running VMWare inside Xen inside Virtualbox on Linux inside HTML5 Linux emulator.... we are now succumbed to trivial what-if scenarios. What type of dog food should I feed my dog? blah blah blah ... Feed you dog cat flavoured dogfood, c'mon think!

Re:What the fuck

[Tim12s]

Running on a Chrome-book of course...

Re:What the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he meant to post this on Lifehacker or something.

Re:What the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of all the Indians on software dev forums asking for questions that could be determined with 5 minutes of work, or worse, Googling. This thread will feature no consensus and probably will do more harm to an opinion than good.

Re:What the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you not think?

Ya, that's what I tell anyone that asks me anything. There was a time when you could count on experts helping out to save you some time or to get you started on a complicated area that you weren't familar with. In fact, there use to be computer clubs where information was shared. I guess that time is gone.

Re:What the fuck

[anotheregomaniac]

It has to compete with Reddit.

Re:What the fuck

[hawguy]

It's software. Look at the menu options and read the manual if you need a reference.

Can you not think?

I don't know if you'd bother to read the question, but he wasn't asking how to use the software, he was asking what software was recommended. It's not like he said "Hey, I just installed VMware on my computer and I don't know how to use it. Help!"

I fail to see how your post was modded insightful - you didn't even answer the question that was asked.

Re:What the fuck

[Iamthecheese]

I'm sick of advanced users ganging up to disdain anyone who asks a question they could learn the answer to if they would only read a 500 page manual or three, It's an ugly canker on the face of geek culture.

Re:What the fuck

[causality]

Why is parent modded at -1? Seriously, just look around and play with them wtf?

Acting helpless is the new(er) status symbol. Handholding you didn't need makes a statement. It says you deserve to be served - you have people for that. Of course intellectual laziness is also a popular development, which oddly seems to get worse and worse as information becomes more and more instantly available.

The vitriol that comes out of some people when you dare to suggest that they can handle something independently is amazing. "Hey, you're bright enough and resourceful enough to do this all by yourself" is a compliment. Not reinforcing someone's codependency is a good thing. The anger and vitriol, then, requires an explanation. The anger comes from not paying tribute, not agreeing with the sense of entitlement.

Not encouraging such a character weakness makes you a bad person, somehow. You'll be told how smug and elitist you are, etc. All of the negative feedback is designed to make you cave and pay tribute anyway. After all, you didn't go along with their self-importance so you must be punished. As though someone who says "I am capable of this, and so are you" is being elitist! It's actually an egalitarian position.

This paragraph is for the small-minded who invent things to rail against that were not said. Obviously, if someone makes a sincere effort and gets stumped that's different. That happens to everyone sometimes. But this does not require any complex skill or specialized knowledge. Basic literacy and a few minutes are the only resources this person would need in order to answer his own question. He demonstrated both just by asking the question, so we know he has them. Wanting help for that is a highly indirect (thus deniable) way of saying his time is more valuable than yours or mine.

Once you know yourself well enough to see (and thus, stop) these petty ego mechanisms within your own psychology, you will start to see them everywhere in others as well. The horrifying part is how universally accepted and unquestioned it is. It doesn't take very much introspection or contemplation to understand these things. What it does take is some kind of inner life to balance out the constant hectic worry about externals like work, bills, the economy, politics, and this-and-that. Otherwise there is no basis for comparison.

The annoying part is that everything I said above is straightforward ... and someone's self-importance will be offended by it. Perhaps they will twist what I said to insult me in some manner, or act like I've done something horriby evil by pointing this out. That would be most boring and unsurprising.

Re:What the fuck

[Architect_sasyr]

Canker or not you are dealing with a culture who have, well, read a 500 page manual or three. I don't see that it's a big deal to expect the same from others if I had to do it - of course I was doing it before a widespread internet connection was available, but I don't feel that times have changed that much we should not have to learn for ourselves.

Re:What the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

they could learn the answer to if they would only read a 500 page manual or three,

Actually, in this case the OP is absolutely correct. If the question submitter had actually bothered to download, install, and double-click the shiny icon for either VMware Player or Virtual Box, and had a Linux or Windows ISO handy, they would have found just how easy it is to run virtual machines.

Us "advanced" users don't have any trouble answering a question without disdain - when the effort required to find the answer is only a little more than a couple of double-clicks. But hey, if you don't even want to try something once, why should we even bother to answer the question?

Re:What the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be a dick he is interested in other peoples opinions, you could learn a lot from that guy.

Re:What the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone read this guy's post to me, or at the very least, summarize it? It's too long!

Re:What the fuck

[wisty]

There's two reasons newbies might need help - the documentation is not up to scratch (or not newbie friendly), or it's a hard problem with no real solution.

"What VM" is, I think, the second case. Postgres and MySQL are both fine databases, but have different strengths. SQL and No-SQL both have merits. KDE and Gnome are both fine desktop managers. VIM and emacs can both edit text.

Sure, there's differentiation, but there's no easy way to say which is best. My advice would be to just look for the one with the best documentation, because as a newbie that's your biggest problem.

Re:What the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had bothered to read, you would have known he's not asking for a detailed guide on how to get each flavor of VM up and running; he was asking which one an expert would recommend to a beginner.

Re:What the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you!

Not all of us live in our mother's basement and have unlimited time. Some of us know that even if we were to devote the equivalent of a week of work worth of time that we may not notice subtle differences that might come back to bite us months after we have committed to one system and then require another week of work to convert everything over to try some other system. Some of us remember a time when the internet was for helping newbies (while sometimes asking them to RTFM) rather than berate them.

Re:What the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

asking questions like that means you seem, like some one who does complicated things with computers
with out actually having to do anything

if he just sat down and did it, no one would know and where the fun in that .....

yes I know it says anonymous reader...

Re:What the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

The vitriol that comes out of some people when you dare to suggest that they can handle something independently is amazing.

It's not so much offense at the thought that they can handle something, it's usually offense at the tone used. "Can you not think?" isn't a suggestion that the questioner can handle something independently - it's a blatant insult. As is insinuating that the reason they're asking the question is that they want to put the people they are asking the question to into a subservient position.

You'll be told how smug and elitist you are

"Have you tried Google? Usually it's very good for these sorts of questions." - Telling someone they're competent enough to handle things on their own.
"What kind of fucking moron are you? You're a worthless, conceited human being. Don't waste my precious time." - Smug and elitist

It's really quite an easy difference to pick out, if you're looking for it.

Basic literacy and a few minutes are the only resources this person would need in order to answer his own question.

No, not even close. He's looking for advice for which virtualization software to try. How many different packages are there? How long would it take to read through the manual for each? How long to install each, and give them a decent run through? It's going to be more than "a few minutes".

And that's ignoring the fact that there's likely to be "gotchas" that are going to pop up with advanced usage. How long will it take to learn that program X has architecture issues that only crop up under condition Y? There's also other issues that wouldn't come up in a brief perusal of marketing literature/manual: Is the company going into bankruptcy? Is there a bias against the platform (for whatever reason) in the industry? Is there some kickass new program that somehow escaped the questioner's notice?

Prove me wrong. Point to one or more Google searches (using only the terms in his post or similar - remember he's new at virtualization, so he doesn't know all the jargon), or one or more web pages or manual easily found from the information in the post (e.g. the VirtualBox homepage is fine, but don't assume he knows about expert blogger X who's unknown outside the field) which will tell him what he needs to know, at the quality one would likely expect from asking a site of experts. That is, the pages should give a good, relatively unbiased evaluation and comparison of of various virtualization software packages, focusing on the questions of reliability and ease of use. It should also point out potential gotchas and the features he should be looking into but might not be. And remember that you specified "a few minutes" - all of this information should be readable in less than half an hour.

The annoying part is that everything I said above is straightforward ... and someone's self-importance will be offended by it.

Ironically, I'm most offended by the smug self-importance that infuses your post. "I've got things figured out, and you're horribly misguided. I'm living a decent life, while you are intellectually lazy, entitled, and lacking introspection." - it might not be the tone you intended, but it's the tone that comes across.

Perhaps they will twist what I said to insult me in some manner ... That would be most boring and unsurprising

So to keep from boring you, I'm supposed to point out why what you said was wrong, without actually pointing out what was wrong about what you said ... while such a post would be very interesting, I'm sorry I must disappoint you. (By the way, great job of trying to poisoning the well for replies. Well, great rhetorically, though not so great for honest discourse.)

Re:What the fuck

[symbolset]

Sometimes a smart person will ask a simple question, not because he needs the answer but because he feels the discussion will be instructive to others, or yield useful new insight. /. being a herd of nerd there will be many and apposite solutions and viewpoints offered. This is a legitimate Ask Slashdot question and should come up every year.

Having praised the question I probably should give an answer: "yes".

And since I've been accused of being cryptically terse here recently I should expand on that. All the major virtual machine platforms are free. A learner who wants to understand the relative merits can and should try them all, read, ask and participate in online discussions about them. Learn about the numerous available virtual appliances free and commercial as well. In the current environment VM proficiency is a basic systems admin requirement.

Re:What the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

it either that or, some huge complicated project they clearly have no idea what involves, like "want build mother board for super computer
please send schematic"

Re:What the fuck

[blade8086]

hey asshat, care to remove your software-advertising signature in that case?

I know how to google for security scanners, so your waste of bandwidth is not appreciated

Re:What the fuck

[RabidTimmy]

By that logic, we should require everyone to derive Calculus from scratch, because "Hey, Newton had to do it on his own." The reason we are where we are today is because people passing on what they learned before decreasing the amount of time for the next person to learn the same concepts.

Re:What the fuck

[snspdaarf]

So, don't answer. Don't post anything.

Re:What the fuck

[Genda]

I had a long conversation with a man I consider brilliant (at least in the area of causing people to be extraordinary.) I listened to him speak about "Being Nice" as distinct from being gracious or compassionate. We (most folks) be nice so people will like us, so people will think well of us, as a function of social survival. The people who're truly dedicated to the greatness of others, are to a person, not nice. Watch professional coaches, when they need to be supportive they are, when the need to apply brute force to knock the crap loose, they do, when the thing that is required to make a difference is, in your face rage, they will be in your face shouting. The funny thing is that nice people garner like. The hard-ass straight-up people who would rather take a spit in the eye and make you rise to the occasion than all the kind words under heaven, garner rabid dedication and respect.

We've raised a generation of young people who are for the most part spoon fed, almost utterly protected from concerns about self esteem, in a world wrapped in nerf and sanitized for their convenience. That was very nice for this generation of adults, but I'm not at all certain we've done our children or our society any great favors. Perhaps its easier when you make people dependent on authority, so they acquiesce as a matter of habit, herd animals. Personally I think there is healthy place between crazed individualists and social drones. I fear we aren't currently at anything resembling the sweet spot.

Re:What the fuck

[SomePgmr]

I think that's actually a fair answer to the original question, so for something a little more challenging, let's change the tone.

You'd like to start getting familiar with the use of hypervisors and virtual machines, from vocabulary up to practical application. You're a hands on kind of guy, but good, accompanying reference material would be useful too.

At first this will be for personal use, but with an eye towards understanding their use in a business environment at the SMB level. Keep in mind, since you're starting out at home on your own equipment, doing this out of pocket, cost is a concern, so we probably aren't looking for a 5-digit pricetag on a commercial solution.

Now, what would you recommend?

Re:What the fuck

[Architect_sasyr]

Your logic needs to be checked. Someone has gone to the effort of writing down all of Newtons work, annotated and bound into a big textbook. Someone has gone to all the effort of putting together a wikipedia entry on virtualisation and have even included an entire page worth of software comparisons. You don't see an "advanced user" getting shitty when someone says "on this particular hardware configuration every third packet gets dropped when using a virtual interface for 802.1q" because clearly that person has been working at it for a while. On the other hand, if someone asked on slashdot "how do I determine the length of the longest side in a right angled triangle" they would be shouted down for the same reason a lot of people are shouting down the OP. These are basics you can either look up, or pay someone to teach you (i.e. school/ university). Most of us have at least gone to the effort of reading the 500 page manual, because someone wrote it to make our job easier.

The culmination of knowledge on the internet should not be a bunch of people telling you the answer. Expert systems and other forms of AI make it easier to look up the answer (i.e. google) which should see, if nothing else, a reduction in basics questions.

Unfortunately this is not the case and there is a particularly large rise in questions like this - particularly amongst the currently-in-school generation of "first world" learners. My citation? Every day experience consulting into schools for OLPC-style deployments.

Re:What the fuck

[Hylandr]

[quote]
My advice would be to just look for the one with the best documentation, because as a newbie that's your biggest problem
[/quote]

So this definitively rules out Oracle...

I will add Cast to that list also. Personally I Love VMWare. It has free licences, it's easy for people just starting out without sacrificing more advanced features.

There are some parts of VMware that cost though, but I can live with out them.

Re:What the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

VMWare inside Xen inside Virtualbox on Linux inside HTML5 Linux emulator

So that's the correct order! I've been having so much trouble because some of them require the VT-x features on the processor, but not all of them properly emulate the VT-x functions for within the guests, I just couldn't get them layered in the right order. Thanks!

Re:What the fuck

[theshowmecanuck]

Wow. You are a rare breed. You started out as an advanced computer user as soon as you were born. Fuck, I wouldn't doubt that you are advanced at everything. And you can do anything be reading a book and never get help from anyone. Nor have you ever asked anyone for help or advice. Fuck, you are superman. Wow, never thought I'd see the day...

Re:What the fuck

[sourcerror]

RTFM

Re:What the fuck

[jelizondo]

I think the first post seriously contaminated the discussion.

I, for one, but have loved to read the opinion of people actually using such software and their experience with it.

I have no need for VM, but I think the opinion of those using it, in many different settings, is much more valuable that any wiki entry or manual.

Perhaps your time would have better spent giving us some information instead of a rant?

Re:What the fuck

[Larryish]

VirtualBox.

'Nuff said.

Re:What the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

Canker or not you are dealing with a culture who have, well, read a 500 page manual or three. I don't see that it's a big deal to expect the same from others if I had to do it - of course I was doing it before a widespread internet connection was available, but I don't feel that times have changed that much we should not have to learn for ourselves.

Back when you read the 500 page manual, there was only three of them. Now there are 37 or more. So just skip the holier than thou attitude and suggest which of the 59 manuals we should look at before their number gets into triple digits.

Re:What the fuck

[camperdave]

What's the point of standing on the shoulders of Giants if you can't ask them what their favourite part of the view is?

Re:What the fuck

[icebike]

Acting helpless is the new(er) status symbol. Handholding you didn't need makes a statement. It says you deserve to be served - you have people for that. Of course intellectual laziness is also a popular development, which oddly seems to get worse and worse as information becomes more and more instantly available.

Look, the guy asked:

"I am getting ready to start learning the use of virtual machines. What VM software would you recommend?"

You then dump on him with a great deal of pontification simply because he asked for opinions. What the hell is wrong with you?

What, pray tell, is the purpose of education if each person has to find out everything by themselves, and no one can take advantage of the collective wisdom of society, and the accumulated learning built up over history?

Is each child destined to be run over by the first car they see, or burned by the first fire, cut by the first knife they encounter simply because asking for advise, and by extension, giving any, is somehow a shameful act?

Asking questions and collecting opinions is how humans learn. Since you apparently woke up one morning and found yourself an infant laying in the weeds, and proceeded to educate, cloth, feed, and raise yourself alone, with no help from society, I'm left with one question: What species are you?

Re:What the fuck

[rrohbeck]

Accessing a CentOS IPMI console in the Virtualbox Windows VM on the Xubuntu system at work in a NX window on my Debian box is confusing enough for me.

Re:What the fuck

[bogjobber]

"Just google it" requires that this sort of discussion is already easily available on the internet, which is often not the case. The question first needs to be posed on some sort of forum where experts congregate, otherwise it doesn't exist! And on a huge forum such as slashdot, you're going to eventually get into arguments over different software packages and with all the bickering over minutiae you'll learn more about the software in 15 minutes of reading than you ever would looking over documentation.

Right now googling "vm software beginner" returns this as the first result and simply "vm software" is on the front page, making it considerably easier for people to find without having to ask this question again.

Re:What the fuck

[Monkey]

I've noticed this seems to be a chronic problem with the Gen-Y guys we hire. If they can't lean back in their chair and savagely click at shit with their mouse to get things working, they say it's "impossible" or "too hard". What ever happened to being able to delve into a problem to figure out the underlying cause? I'm sure they're capable of it, but I don't know if they just haven't been taught how to do this, or it's just simply that they're too fucking lazy.

Re:What the fuck

[redmid17]

I'm pretty sure every generation has said the same god damn thing for the last ten thousand years, and I don't think it holds any merit.

Re:What the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

First read it as: "Not all of us live in your mother's basement ...." :-D

Re:What the fuck

[Eunuchswear]

apt-get install kvm
qemu-img create hda.img 8G
kvm -cdrom sid.iso -hda hda.img -boot d

Re:What the fuck

[blackest_k]

There is no real substitute for experience.

I've used a couple of Vm's Virtualbox and vmware. Vmware workstation requires a licence to run the VM but could be used to configure a VM without a license, this may have changed. The VM could be then run for free using vmplayer. Virtualbox can be used for free with the community version or the personally licensed version which supports connecting usb devices.

That's pretty much my experience with vm's There is fun and games to be had with networking options and sharing data with VM's and there is also the question of hosting. Do you want a full blown OS running at the same time as your VM/S (grabbing a big chunk of resources) and should your disks be physical / virtual.

Then you can also move VM's between computer systems which I know nothing about.
costs can be from free to very expensive.

Then of course there is the question of what guest OS can be run effectively in a VM and the applications of a VM you might want to just run a simple server or a full blown OS. Windows and Linux are usually easy to install in a VM but howabout OSX or android.
Then there is the host cpu which also can be a major factor.
Some people are running desktop versions of linux on android devices, ok not a VM as such but perhaps related.

I don't think i have mentioned every topic in relation to VM's but there is a lot of interesting things that could be discussed under the heading virtual machines. The least interesting of which is well you could just google that and the poster is being lazy.

As a jumping off point the original question is fine and ideal for professional and enthusiasts to run with in a myriad of directions. Hopefully everyone who is interested will learn something new to them or maybe spark an idea that may be useful to them personally or professionally.

As a master craftsman in your chosen field of endeavour isn't it a good thing to help guide the inexperienced?
I agree that some questions have simple answers, but perhaps the real answer is not the solution to a particular problem but the methodology of solving that type of question. In this case the answer isn't quite as simple as use virtualbox or vmware but why would you choose one over the other.

Re:What the fuck

[BeanThere]

I won't touch VMWare, have had too many problems with it (the free version even hosed one of my machines). VMWare was good in the beginning but at some point it became the Adobe of virtual machine software. I prefer VirtualBox, even though it's now Oracle, somehow Oracle seem not to have fucked it up yet.

Re:What the fuck

[strikethree]

You know what? Byte me.

I know quite a bit about VMs and such. I have used VMWare, Virtualbox, and Hyper V... but I am still here reading the fucking article and comments.

Why?

Because in a discussion like this, new stuff can be learned. If you REALLY didn't want to fucking participate in the discussion, how hard would it have for you to NOT click on it?

Sadly, I learned nothing new this time. Maybe next time... if you did not scare everyone off.

Re:What the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually we do do that. It's part of learning Calculus.

Re:What the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, if he doesn't know about Expert Blogger X, then asking us is the quickest, easiest way to find out for him and as a social species we have an obligation to share that information with him.

GP is a really crappy post. Thank you for deconstructing it for us.

Re:What the fuck

[Thumper_SVX]

tl;dr: People suck.

Re:What the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to prove the guy's point, scrote..

Re:What the fuck

[Hognoxious]

Apparently the attention span of the average geek has dropped below 130 to approx 95.

I heard some were such dimbulbs that they forget to put units on quantities.

Re:What the fuck

[Hanzie]

I'm pretty sure every generation has said the same god damn thing for the last ten thousand years, and I don't think it holds any merit.

They have, and we've gotten stupider each generation.

Who's opinion are we supposed to trust? Yours, or every generation that has lived for the last 10,000 years? Before you argue, remember, only the last generation has created "The Jersey Shore".

Re:What the fuck

[theArtificial]

Not all of us live in our mother's basement and have unlimited time.

I don't live in a basement or have unlimited time, but I do know how to ask questions and formulate searches to get answers. Google is like the card catalog found in libraries. It's pretty unfortunate that someone's unable to use it effectively, that should be motivation enough to improve. If you're being paid to do this for work, sounds like you're unqualified.

Some of us know that even if we were to devote the equivalent of a week of work worth of time that we may not notice subtle differences that might come back to bite us months after we have committed to one system and then require another week of work to convert everything over to try some other system.

What are you doing that takes a week to discover if your VM can or can't do it? You'll know pretty much after installing something on it if it'll work, if not, chances are someone has already had the issue and it'll be listed on their forums (or somewhere else which is accessible via Google.)

Some of us remember a time when the internet was for helping newbies (while sometimes asking them to RTFM) rather than berate them.

In the time it takes someone to read all of the replies here one could put on their thinking cap and use Google to:

1. 1) Find the most popular VMs currently. Example: "Popular Virtual Machine software 2012"
2. 2) Visit the project/company websites and see what features they have, and review their licenses. Paid, Free private/commercial, etc.
3. 3) Cruise on over to Youtube or Vimeo if you need additional help installing, configuring, using these platforms.

The barrier to entry has never been cheaper or easier than it is today. If you're too lazy to even do your own homework what makes you think this endeavor will be successful? Getting a VM and installing something onto it is the easy part, the hard part is the work you're doing with it.

Re:What the fuck

[theArtificial]

What, pray tell, is the purpose of education if each person has to find out everything by themselves, and no one can take advantage of the collective wisdom of society, and the accumulated learning built up over history?

They don't have to find out everything by themselves. Chances are people have done what this guy is trying to do and have written about their experiences. If only there was some way to find this information, perhaps someone has asked the question before?

Re:What the fuck

[theArtificial]

You clearly need to add more Sirs to it. example:
"Sir, want build mother board for super computer please send schematic, thank you"

At least they're polite =/

Re:What the fuck

[theArtificial]

I have no need for VM, but I think the opinion of those using it, in many different settings, is much more valuable that any wiki entry or manual.

His post is spot on. The question isn't profound and has been asked and answered many times over the years. There is more to the internet than wiki entries and manuals. Most of these software packages have forums and guides specifically about setting up, configuring, and using these packages. Failing that there are oodles of video tutorials on sites like Youtube and Vimeo. To top it off basic questions about "Recommented free VM software" have been asked (and answered). If you have technical questions those are best found where users of the software congregate, if you can't fathom where that would be, first try the vendors website.

Perhaps your time would have better spent giving us some information instead of a rant?

So your solution is to rant about a rant? Maybe you can make an ask slashdot question about this very topic!

Re:What the fuck

[celtic_hackr]

What are you doing that takes a week to discover if your VM can or can't do it? You'll know pretty much after installing something on it if it'll work, if not, chances are someone has already had the issue and it'll be listed on their forums (or somewhere else which is accessible via Google.)

Ok, I'll field this one. Set up a machine with VM on your home network (no static ip), play with it for a week or two. Now take that machine and stick it on a network with static IPs. Oops! It no longer works.

There's one example. I could probably add more. There's plenty of good reasons to ask around for **opinions** on a good place to start. Yes, one could Google and find opinions. But if you wanted to get a concensus how would you do that with Google? It's not even close to being as interactive as /. is.

Granted, Google is far less disfunctional. But since most people come from families with varying degrees of disfuntionality, /. is a natural pace to ask for opinions.

Lighten up people. Read and understand before spazzing out with flaming responses on a simple opinion poll by a fellow /.er. Someday you might actually want an opinion on something too. Perhaps on how to behave in civil society. I won't hold my breath.

Last I checked, asking for opinions and recommendations isn't the same thing as asking for instructions or what any VM is capable of. Maybe someone changed the meaning of all the words in the English language and didn't inform me, but I doubt that. Lastly, your assumption you'd understand and run into any problems in a week is laughable. I write software for a living and sometimes bugs slip in. Sometimes users don't hit on a bug for months at a time. So a one week limit on testing is ridiculous, and with something as complex as VMs, it's unlikely anyone outside a team of engineers would be able to fully trest an install in a week. Let alone a single person in their spare time, and a newbie at that.

Re:What the fuck

[theArtificial]

Lighten up people. Read and understand before spazzing out with flaming responses on a simple opinion poll by a fellow /.er. Someday you might actually want an opinion on something too. Perhaps on how to behave in civil society. I won't hold my breath.

I'm not flaming or spazzing out. My opinion and reasoning are pretty sound, especially for a question which has been asked and answered before, many times over the years. I've listed links in several of my other posts, if you're curious to what they may be.

Lastly, your assumption you'd understand and run into any problems in a week is laughable. I write software for a living and sometimes bugs slip in.

I'm not the one who came up with the week time frame, friend. See the post above me, in fact since you were too lazy to even do that I'll quote it:

Some of us know that even if we were to devote the equivalent of a week of work worth of time that we may not notice subtle differences that might come back to bite us months after we have committed to one system and then require another week of work to convert everything over to try some other system.

I'm aware of bugs slipping in software, this is another reason to understand your platform, and does anyone do unit tests anymore?

Re:What the fuck

[alicezou]

yes. completely correct. http://www.topsupraskytop.com/

Re:What the fuck

[MooseTick]

Yep. On a side note, how do I determine the length of the longest side in a right angled triangle?

Re:What the fuck

[redmid17]

Clearly we've gotten stupider every generation. I mean we went from horse and buggies to the moon in 50 years so CLEARLY you are right on all accounts. People like Shakespeare and Chaucer were never considered trivial hacks at all. None whatsoever. Get over yourself. You do not know what you're talking about.

VMware is very easy

[blandcramration]

I honestly just used VMware for the first time today but it was very easy to use and booted up in seconds. You can add virtual drives with a click and if you are anywhere familiar with the operating system you are attempting to emulate, I'd say it's a safe bet. Maybe the community can offer a few free options for you to try out as well.

Re:VMware is very easy

[Anonymous Coward]

I second vmware if it is anything windows/linux related. Oracle's stuff is too unstable and MS just integrates well with windows. For everything else, kvm is more than enough and the best value.

Re:VMware is very easy

[CaptainJeff]

Really? You just used VMware? The predecessor for all of these? Well...OK then but please do not pretend to offer an informed opinion on VM software.

Re:VMware is very easy

[Darinbob]

Isn't it also very expensive?

I really know little aobut this area, and was only reading the thread hoping to learn something. Instead if seems to have been hacked since it is full of much more abuse than is typical for slashdot.

Re:VMware is very easy

[Gerzel]

VMware is great. Though I've mostly used Virtualbox. For most personal uses VBox does things fairly well and is free. There are several other offerings out there. Try the free ones find one you like is what I'd recommend.

Re:VMware is very easy

[symbolset]

Yes, this is far more abuse than is typical for /., but it's the Friday leading into a three day weekend in the US - Veterans Day - so many of us may be more drunk than usual.

All of the basic hypervisors are free, basically because kvm is free and included in Linux and the rest of them don't want to die.

The expensive parts are the management suites, advanced feature enablement, and support, none of which you need to get grounded in VM basics.

Re:VMware is very easy

[jelizondo]

Thanks for explaining the unusual behavior over a legitimate question; I thought that perhaps you guys were dejected over Romney not winning or FoxConn not opening a factory in the U.S. or some such :->.

Re:VMware is very easy

[uvajed_ekil]

I agree that VMware is a good choice, since it is relatively polished, capable, and stable. However, the cost of Virtualbox is rather attractive, and I have used it with success, as well. For a true beginner, VMware might be the easiest, but you might as well give Virtualbox a shot if you just want to learn and mess around. The fact that Virtualbox is free should not be taken to indicate that it is not a viable alternative. I have no experience with Xen.

Re:VMware is very easy

[LordLimecat]

Virtualbox is a nice entry hypervisor, and certainly if youre brand new start there.... but I wouldnt do anything production on it. I have had upgrades render VMs unusable, though with a downgrade and substantial effort I was able to restore them. Virtualbox has the basics, but it has its bugs. Using it for a few years before moving to Workstation will help you to appreciate when a hypervisor works correctly :)

Its also worth mentioning that if you go to Windows 8, you have Hyper-V, which I understand has started to suck a lot less in version 3.

Re:VMware is very easy

[Clsid]

I disagree. VirtualBox is not unstable. In fact, I think it is perfect for a beginner. It is free and if you grab Gentoo Linux, you would be learning a lot of just about everything. After you are done with VirtualBox you should really get into kernel hypervisors. That's about it. No vmware needed, or paying for software in the learning process.

Re:VMware is very easy

[Anonymous Coward]

VMware also allows for drag and drop between the guest and host. I don't think Virtual Box does that, but I could be wrong. There are ways around not having drag and drop, but I find drag and drop between guest/host to be the simplest way to move files around. Just my personal preference.

Re:VMware is very easy

[mitzampt]

And I disagree with you. I've been using VirtualBox a lot in the last 3 years and it's come a long way but it has a lot of rough edges. I agree it's really useful for a beginner, especially when you're unsure about an investment, and a good path to specialized solutions, but you can't ignore the fact that it crashes more than VMware. Take my word for it.

Re:VMware is very easy

[DeathElk]

Gentoo? We want him to learn, not commit suicide!

Re:VMware is very easy

[Pieroxy]

Really? You just used VMware? The predecessor for all of these? Well...OK then but please do not pretend to offer an informed opinion on VM software.

And why would that be? Only people having had experience with at least 6 different VM software are eligible for the discussion?

VMWare works right out of the box with no user manual even needed. That's already more than can be said for any of the competition.

Re:VMware is very easy

[zakeria]

I switched from VMWare to Parallels about three years ago and have never looked back, faster cleaner less bugs!

Re:VMware is very easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that VMware is just the company - they have various products including Workstation, Fusion, ESXi, Player, Server etc.

Re:VMware is very easy

[Anonymous Coward]

VMWare Player is free and it also allows creation of new virtual machines.

Re:VMware is very easy

[Mark of the North]

VMWare works right out of the box with no user manual even needed. That's already more than can be said for any of the competition.

Not so sure about that last sentence there.

I trained a new hire to use VirtualBox on an Ubuntu 12.04 box this week. He had just about zero experience with virtualization. Basically my instructions were to have installation ISOs for whatever OS he wants to run virtualized and to apt-get install virtualbox. He then set everything up on his own and only asked for help when it came to setting up a virtual network. I told him he should first figure out cloning. A few minutes later we were back on the virtual network. My own experience a couple of years ago was similar. In both cases, we had the manual handy, but never used it.

My proficiency with KVM/libvirt took more effort. But virt-manager makes it pretty straight-forward. Our KVM/libvirt virtualization system has several host nodes running a few dozen guests with storage on a SAN/NAS (it does both). This wasn't painful to do at all. An automatic backups/snapshot system has been more challenging, but that's mostly just because we want to minimize interruption of the guest (just suspend the guest, grab an LVM snapshot, wake the guest, copy the snapshot, free the snapshot) and due to our larger guests being about 200GB in size. Storing versions of files that large, and moving them around, requires delta compression. (Hint: Use xdelta3 before copying the data off-site.)

We also played with Proxmox a few months ago. A summer student had all of the above (except for backups) working in two days. Confusion over whether the licensing was really free, the fact that it is its own distribution (a double-edged sword for sure), and the fact that configuration of aggregate network links (LACP) was really goofy, all kept us from adopting it. Too bad, being able to switch a guest from one host to another in real-time while viewing the guest's display with only a tiny pause, was a really neat trick.

If I can do the above mixed in with all of my other responsibilities (as a school authority director of tech), anyone can.

Re:VMware is very easy

[jimbo]

Damn Elk! Now I got coffee all over the keyboard!

Re:VMware is very easy

[VGPowerlord]

Parallels might be OK for OSX hosts, but the article specifies starting on a Windows host and then maybe switching to a Linux host.

Re:VMware is very easy

[VGPowerlord]

VMWare Player is free and doesn't even require that you sign up for a VMWare account like you used to. Why not try it?

Plus, as I recall, it's the only one that works properly with DirectX across all DX versions for Windows VMs.

Re:VMware is very easy

[Anonymous Coward]

The point, of course, is that VirtualBox is way easier than VMWare. A point I wholeheartedly agree with.

Not a little bit, a LOT.

Re:VMware is very easy

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm amazed that people seem to still have the perception that VMWare costs money. Yes, the higher end ones do but VMWare Player costs nothing and, from what I can see, has everything the OP desires. It certainly does me with all my needs, and they're much more than what was in this question.

Re:VMware is very easy

[TempestRose]

Actually, in my personal experience, virtualbox sucks ass running inside win 7 64 pro.
I purchased parallels and am MUCH happier with it. Not that parallels is perfect either, but it sure as hell is more stable.

virtualbox crashed guests regularly and the host on occasion.

Just my 2 cents...

Re:VMware is very easy

[tigersha]

Ditto on the "unstable" part. We have a Rails webserver that usually runs on a server. Once in a while we need to demo this offsite or use it somewhere at a venue where the internet is flaky or expensive. Easy. Use a Linux VM, host on Windows. Youo click on the VM, it starts and it runs and browser goes to the VM instead of online.

With Oracle Virtual Box it was a disaster. Spontaneous reboots, slow, not responsive network. VMWare solved the problem instantly.

That said, I heard that Virtual Box runs better when you use it to host windows on linux istead of the other way around.

I use Parallels on a Mac. It works fine and is much much easier to use than Virtualbox.

Just make sure you have a lot of memory, especially if you want to host Windows 7 or 8. 8 Gb is minimum, on my Hackintosch I have 32 Gb. ALso, more virtual processors is better, so try a i7 with hyperthreading instead of a i5. Remember, you need the resources to run 2 operating systems at the same time. Linux, if run in Terminal mode, is much more lightweight than Windows.

Re:VMware is very easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtualbox is a nice entry hypervisor, and certainly if youre brand new start there.... but I wouldnt do anything production on it. I have had upgrades render VMs unusable, though with a downgrade and substantial effort I was able to restore them. Virtualbox has the basics, but it has its bugs. Using it for a few years before moving to Workstation will help you to appreciate when a hypervisor works correctly :)

Its also worth mentioning that if you go to Windows 8, you have Hyper-V, which I understand has started to suck a lot less in version 3.

Thank you. I think i'll file this under "learning from other people's experience".

Also, seeking to permanently avoid Windows 8 is one of the reasons i am going in this direction.

Re:VMware is very easy

[Anonymous Coward]

VMWare Player is free and doesn't even require that you sign up for a VMWare account like you used to. Why not try it?

Plus, as I recall, it's the only one that works properly with DirectX across all DX versions for Windows VMs.

Thank you. That sounds important.

One of the things i am hoping to do is harvest the installs off of some of my older machines to keep around.

Re:VMware is very easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello,

Only VMware has the feature "Easy Install" for OS guest's supported, so it's more easy for the beginners, IMHO.

Re:VMware is very easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo has some of the best technical documentation of any distribution. Enough that when you do manage to screw up something major you will probably be able to repair it. The compilation requirement is a bugger but you don't have to go crazy with use flags if you don't want to.

Re:VMware is very easy

[harrkev]

I chose VirtualBox for use at my office -- for one simple reason: the ability to run it as a server.

First, I run Linux on my desktop at work, but I have a Windows 7 VM running in the background.

For desktop applications where you will always have a GUI up, either one is just fine (VirtualBox or VMware Player), and I doubt that you would be able to tell much difference between them -- both are really about the same to install and set up.

On the other hand, if you want to be able to have teh Windows VM start up whenever you power on your Linux box, VirtualBox has a headless mode that works great. I can then use rdesktop to fire up a windows screen from any machine on the network, or use remote desktop from any Windows box. I had to do a little digging in the manuals and make a couple of scripts to get everything to work the way I wanted it to, but I am quite happy now.

VMWare Player, on the other hand, will only run if you active have the GUI up an running -- which means that you have to be logged in. This was the deal breaker for me.

There is also VMWare Server, which is an entirely different beast. That WILL let you run machines in the background, but it is not free, and the GUI is considerably more complicated. It is really intended for a rack-mount server hosting a dozen virtual machines, so it is really a LOT more complicated than it needs to be for somebody playing around with another OS.

This is my experience running on a Red Hat 6 box. If you use Windows as a host, your mileage may vary.

Re:VMware is very easy

[zakeria]

I run Parallels on Windows, OSX and Linux so I don't see what you mean?

Re:VMware is very easy

[VGPowerlord]

Whoops, I was under the impressions that Parallels was OSX-only as its host machine.

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Try them all. Dedicate a day or so to each one with the goal of having a fully working linux vm and a fully working windows vm at the end of the day. Then you'll be able to write a slashvertisement about what you've learned and we'll all be better off. Take lots of pictures.

Re:Yes

[HybridST]

This!

Re:Yes

[fostware]

+1 for "Try them all."

Everyone here will have baggage from older versions, vendor bias, or a barrow to push.

As an example, I refuse to deploy Hyper-V in production ever since it mangled the VM XML configs on unexpected reboots, causing VMs to disappear from the management console. I've no doubt it somewhat fixed, but I still come across the occasional forum post bitching about a lost VM.

Re:Yes

[xhrit]

I'm going to also agree, trying them for yourself is the best course of action. Nothing beats well documented hands-on experimentation.

Virtualbox

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtualbox.

Re:VirtualBox

[Anonymous Coward]

The addon in virtual box that makes a "seamless" desktop is awesome. Run windows apps alongside *nix apps in one desktop.

Re:Virtualbox

[epine]

I recently configured my first virtual host under VirtualBox to run LMDE, as my desktop Mint was behind the times on some packages I needed for a online course on big data. I didn't want to convert my main desktop to LMDE without some miles under my belt. There are many package management problems I can fix quickly enough, and just as many that leave me dead in the water. This was my "straw poll" installation.

I made a huge blunder allocating only 8GB for the system disk. I hit the disk full condition installing some small packages right after obtaining the latest Update Pack. There were package errors. Gnome keyring now constantly tells me about some missing directory. Related? Who knows. Once you've hit disk full, you're guessing until the end of eternity. The storage problem was due to 1.2GB of retained deb files in /var/cache/apt/archives. I ran a command line tool to increase the size of the disk image, but this didn't show up as extra disk space inside the OS.

Some package management command at the command line to gather a list of installed packages decided to spawn a GUI view window (I didn't expect this) which immediately punted my window manager, leaving my console windows tiny and immobile. Related? Who knows.

Overall it's been 98% pain free. The other nee Sun product I recommend is ZFS. I could really get into this snapshot business in a big way.

Re:VirtualBox

[andrew3]

Agreed. I tried helping someone that was using VMWare, and the options were more confusing.

The VMWare EULA is rather dodgy and it's very long. There's also a clause where they can set a third-party (like the BSA) on you.

VirtualBox is free software, no EULAs, works fine.

Re:Virtualbox

[nschubach]

Speaking of snapshots in ZFS... snapshots in VirtualBox are also very nice. I have a Windows VM for testing and I have a snapshot that's bare install with updates. I just revert to that snapshot and do any new updates (if there are any, then re-snapshot) and work on a base install of Windows. There's no cleanup of installs or other software. It makes Windows much nicer to work with.

Re:VirtualBox

[Anonymous Coward]

The dichotomy is interesting -- the "don't ask questions, read multiple 500 page manuals, then make a half-baked decision and call yourself a genius for having done all that hard work" vs the parent. The original question was asked very humbly -- and was seeking real world advice -- what would you use if you were a newbie to virtualization? It wasn't "I'm an idiot, do it for me" as some previous posters asserted. It was a "hey you've been down this road, you know where the stupidities are, I'd like to leverage your hard earned knowledge".

Now for my answer: when I start middle and high school kids out on this I go with virtual box. I've found it to be less fiddly than others; Xen is great until you send a kid home to work on a project in a VM and he wants to run it on dad's windows box. After even a little success, it's easy to branch out and explore. Also, not everyone has time to read the 500 page manuals -- some of us who are also card carrying geeks are out there working on things like engineering proteins for cell repair. What's the you say, you want to leverage that technology for post heart-attack recovery (you sit on your hind qtrs all day, eat junk food, you'll need it).... oh go read the manual and reproduce all the experiments or have your Doc do the same. You want to know what the best early bio-markers are for Alz Disease so you can try treatments BEFORE your brain rots -- go do your own work -- go read all the medical journal articles -- even those in that field can't keep up with the reading!

Re:Virtualbox

[Fred Ferrigno]

I ran a command line tool to increase the size of the disk image, but this didn't show up as extra disk space inside the OS.

Likely this only increased the size of the virtual disk, but not the partition that the OS lives on. Partition resizing is file-system-dependent as it requires understanding the FS layout. gparted can do the job if you boot from a live CD, but it'd be simpler to just start over since the OS is screwed up anyway.

BTW, VirtualBox defaults to dynamically sized disks that only take up as much physical space as is actually used by the guest OS. The allocation size is more of a maximum size, so you can safely set it higher than you think you'll need and not waste space.

Re:VirtualBox

[martiniturbide]

VirtualBox runs OS/2 as guest!!! that's a must for VM engine :)

Re:Virtualbox

[SampleFish]

Yes VirtualBox. It's quick and easy. Good support. Multi-platform. Competitive featureset. What more could you ask for?

Re:Virtualbox

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a clarification, the GPL version of VirtualBox is rarely the version I see used. Fortunately, the license of the non-free and commonly used one is extremely lenient in it's definition of "personal use", which makes it perfectly legal for commercial use under non-business critical applications. Please read the terms of use.

Also, having used many vm solutions, the OP is likely best off starting with VirtualBox, but using the VMWare disk format for forward compatibility and snapshotting the VMs pre-vmtools so they can later be rolled back and migrated when they go serious business into VMWare.

Re:VirtualBox

[DrHappyAngry]

Virtualbox is a great starting point since he's looking for something to run on windows. I have found it's performance to be lacking, but it's a good way to cut your teeth. Once you cut your teeth on the concepts of virtualization and get a bit of Linux experience, move on to something that can run on a headless machine and save resources. Virtualbox can do that, but it's actually a bigger headache to setup in headless mode than kvm or xen. KVM is super easy to set up on most distros, and there's some great guides on howtoforge.net. The trickiest part about setting up most of the hypervisors on Linux is creating a bridged network interface, which is only necessary to get the machines out of nat mode and give them IPs on the public network. It's still not that hard to set up the bridged interface, it's just that the rest of the set up is so ridiculously easy, just apt-get/yum intsall the packages with virt-manager to manage it all and you're set. At least in my situation KVM guests required less resources to get the same performance as a virtualbox guest. It wasn't too hard to convert a virtual box VM to a qcow image KVM could use, either, so you're not locked into one hypervisor.

Re:VirtualBox

[ccanucs]

I've used vmware since version 1 and like it a great deal, hosting on both Windows and Linux, and with all manner of Windows and Linux VMs under each and both and simultaneously on the same host. I've recently installed and used VirtualBox on MacOS X (it was the free alternative) and installed Linux as a VM there just fine and without any issues. Both are as easy as each other IMO. Virtualbox feels a tad faster, esp. since it is being used on an older Macbook and is very responsive, but I haven't done any quantitative comparison. I like both. Try each. See what works (BTW, can't understand why everyone was so negative above. The question was a very fair one which gentle (or genteel) slashdotters can step up to easily, esp. since a comparison based on experience was asked for, not "how do I run this because I can't read the help"). VMware has more server-side enterprise-level offerings, but free vmware player is a good end-user product and is comparable to Virtualbox. Adventurous folks might try User-mode Linux (hosted on Linux of course). Kind regards, W.

Re:VirtualBox

[QuantumRiff]

I like that virtualbox is available on multiple platforms.. Makes it much more likely to "play" with things when I can do it anywhere. it is also very, very easy to export with other common formats.

Re:Virtualbox

[thegrassyknowl]

I used to prefer VirtualBox, but it's become quite for me lately. The Linux version occasionally brought down my machine and the Windows version would cause BSODs more than daily.

I switched to VMWare player and I haven't had any issues. The only thing I miss in the free VMWare offering is it's nowhere near as easy/powerful to script things.

Re:VirtualBox

[BLKMGK]

What add-on is this? I've seen Fusion for VMworkstation but nothing for vbox. Sounds like something to try out!

Re:VirtualBox

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed,
I had to provide a virtual machine setup at work to run XP across a number of platforms, one of the requirements was that 'anyone else (other then me) could get to grips with it'.
Six months on, we have Virtualbox running the same 'master' XP image copied to all our Linux, Mac and Win7 systems, anything goes horribly wrong, recopy the master image back across.
(Yes, we eventually opted to run the XP software in a VM on the Win7 boxes, the software we use bombs rather nastily and unpredictably under Win7, and we have the proverbial snowball's chance of getting patches for the software to allow it to work)

Re:Virtualbox

[blackest_k]

There are a couple of things, retrospectively you can give a much higher limit and allocate storage dynamically so your 160 gb diskfile is next to nothing when empty.

you can have fun with clonezilla and gparted iso files. create a new disk image of the size you want and boot from the iso's (cd drive) and gparted will copy the full disk drive to the empty disk disk drive and resize it to fit the partition. After that you just shut down disconnect the first drive connect the second drive to the first drives controller and you should be sorted It's been a few years since i had to do that so i'm fuzzy on the details.

There can be fun and games to be had converting disks between virtual disk formats i think that involved quemu and vboxmanage. Think i used quemu as a usb stick portable install to run my xp vm on some library computers that i wasn't allowed to install on.

Some of the portable versions of some apps can run with wine where the normal desktop install would fail. I think photoshop was one dodgy example.

Re:Virtualbox

[wvmarle]

One gotcha with VirtualBox is that the open source version (as included with Ubuntu, for example) doesn't have USB support. You have to get the closed-source version directly from Oracle for that.

That had me seriously, as the one and only reason I'm using VirtualBox is because I need Windows for my e-banking, which uses a USB encryption device which only has Windows drivers... For the rest, indeed it just works. And that's exactly what I need.

Re:VirtualBox

[Wolfrider]

--Dude, 1998 called; they said they just stopped caring about OS/2 and wanted you to know.

/ former Warp user

Any of these

[Anonymous Coward]

Any of these work well for home uses. Unless you plan on having high availability and seemless server migration or something, you cannot go wrong with any of these options.

Re:Any of these

[Z00L00K]

At least they work as long as you run a common OS, but if you try to run things like QNX it may be worth to look around. I have tried QNX under Vmware and it was really slow.

VirtualBox

[Nexion]

I prefer VirtualBox myself, but also use VMware at work. I also recommend that you try them all. It's not a question of what is best for us, but rather what is best for you.

VirtualBox

[Anonymous Coward]

VirtualBox is the best for a beginner. User-friendly GUI, sane defaults, it Just Works.

VirtualBox Certainly

[mqhiller]

Easy to set up (I walked my brother through it over the phone) easy to use (ditto) and fairly full featured.

Re:VirtualBox Certainly

[Anonymous Coward]

The last time I tried, VirtualBox had problems with network access to VM when the host switched from wireless to wired network, and when host logged onto the VPN. Guest OSes were on NAT. I would assume they should be oblivious to such changes on the host, but that was not the case with VirtualBox.

I moved to VMWare Player. It is free and allows creation of new virtual machines, just as VirtualBox. Networking worked without any surprises, including the scenarios I just described. With this product I can focus on my work instead of fighting to get the basic functionality working. It was straight forward to share folders between host and guest. Perhaps it is the same with VirtualBox too, but again, where were no surprises with VMWare.

Creating new virtual machines with VMWare Player is pretty much the same as with VirtualBox. The options and look and feel are at the same level of complexity/ease.

I don't see any reason to choose VirtualBox over VMWare Player unless you want to run OS2 (as other posts mention), or you want to play specific VMs for VirtualBox (such as Oracle's ready-to-use VMs). VMWare Players works fine, is easy and is free. Use it and get on with your work instead of always fighting to get reasonable functionality to work.

Virtualbox

[BuypolarBear]

Virtualbox is pretty reliable and includes acceleration on 64 bit systems along with an extremely simple to use GUI and easy to install guest additions that allow your display to easily scale. It's the one thing from Oracle that I actually use and recommend to others. For your requirements, it's licensed under the GPL v2 and works on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

Beginner?

[jythie]

VMWare is probably the best beginner VM package due to its documentation, support, and polish. But as others have said, they are all pretty good.

Try VirtualBox...Simple and easy to use wizards

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd recommend virtualbox. It's very easy as are all of the others and free of course.

VMware or VirtualBox

[bsharitt]

Since you may be going cross platform at the host, either VMware or VirtualBox are good options. I've personally been using VirtualBox for a while and find it quite easy to use and being free is a nice perk too. Though I understand VMware Player(the free version of VMware) has grown in a a decent general purpose VM solution for simple desktop virtualization like it sounds like you'll be doing.

Re:VMware or VirtualBox

[nurb432]

QEMU would also be cross platform, even more so than those 2 you suggest.

Re:VMware or VirtualBox

[Solandri]

I've used both for years. VMWare Workstation is the best IMHO, in terms of features, compatibility, and stability. But it costs $200. VMWare Player is probably as stable as Workstation, but is missing a lot of important features, particularly snapshots.

VirtualBox is a good free alternative that has most of the missing features and I'd give it the nod over VMWare Player if you want free. However, it does not react well to moving VMs. With VMWare you can just move/copy the folder containing the VM and most of the time it'll run just fine in its new location. VirtualBox will throw up all sorts of errors if you do that. You have to export the VM, then import it at the new destination to keep it happy (this takes at least 3x as much time as a straight copy).

The last straw, which made me give up on it a year ago, was a bug which caused a failed shrink to put the virtual disk in an inconsistent state and made it impossible for me to recover the VM. I tried restoring the virtual disk from my backups, but apparently the VM configuration files were stored in a folder I wasn't backing up and I ran into the move/copy problem I mentioned above.

As for a hypervisor-based VM, VMWare vSphere is the most fully-featured free product. Some of the missing features make it a pain to mange though (extremely difficult to backup VMs). And while it gives you snapshot capability, you can't make snapshot trees like you can with Workstation and VirtualBox. And I haven't found it to be as stable as VMWare Workstation. It doesn't react well to VMs which crash or hang in certain ways (I can't power them down or reset them, I have to reboot the physical machine).

Re:VMware or VirtualBox

[Anonymous Coward]

However, it does not react well to moving VMs. With VMWare you can just move/copy the folder containing the VM and most of the time it'll run just fine in its new location. VirtualBox will throw up all sorts of errors if you do that. You have to export the VM, then import it at the new destination to keep it happy (this takes at least 3x as much time as a straight copy).

Thank you. That's important.
One of the things i will want to do is run the same vm on different machines.

OpenVZ

[certain death]

I use OpenVZ because it can do containers as well as KVM. It keeps you from having to have different hypervisors for each. It also is fairly easy to setup and has a nice web interface for managing your virtual machines.

Re:OpenVZ

[corychristison]

He's using a Windows host machine. Also plans to use multiple Windows Guest VM's... OpenVZ doesn't work for either situation.

KVM is as bare metal you can get, but setup isn't always easy and requires a Linux Host. KVM is my personal preference but VirtualBox is probably best for his use case. VMware Workstation is great too but not free (last I checked - may have changed).

Re:OpenVZ

[myowntrueself]

OpenVZ is just a glorified chroot. It doesn't have a hypervisor.

We had one of these at my old work, running webservers for developers.

I discovered one day that some Debian scripts use killall to terminate their processes, can't recall if it was during uninstall or '/etc/init.d/script shutdown' but anyhow, what I found was that the process id's for all the processes running on the 'guests' are accessible on the host. I had to restart this process on all of the guests.

You can kill running processes in guests from the host; 'killall processname' on the host kills all instances of that process on all guests.
This is pretty hilarious for a 'virtualisation' system, compared to the likes of Xen, Vmware, Virtualbox or Hyperv.

Like it says in the wikipedia article:
"OpenVZ is not true virtualization but really containerization like FreeBSD Jails"

GLORIFIED CHROOT.

Re:OpenVZ

[certain death]

Right...if you notice, I mentioned containers in my original post. KVM comes built in now. You maybe should have another look at it before making broad statements.

Re:OpenVZ

[Anonymous Coward]

I discovered one day that some Debian scripts use killall to terminate their processes

Those scripts are shit and whoever wrote them is terrible, and should feel terrible. If you've got persistent daemons, track the goddamned process ID.

what I found was that the process id's for all the processes running on the 'guests' are accessible on the host.

And? This is actually one of the most useful features of OVZ.

You can kill running processes in guests from the host; 'killall processname' on the host kills all instances of that process on all guests.
This is pretty hilarious for a 'virtualisation' system, compared to the likes of Xen, Vmware, Virtualbox or Hyperv.

It's more entertaining when you accidentally take out MySQL on ~240 guests. ;) That aside - oh noes! I can outright kill entire guests through Xen, Vmware, et cetera. Pretty hilarious for a 'virtualisation' system, lolololololol.

GLORIFIED CHROOT.

Good luck getting the density you can achieve with OpenVZ, Solaris Zones, or anything else that isn't "True Virtualzation(tm)" with Xen, VMware, et cetera.

Re:OpenVZ

[certain death]

With KVM being built in, Windows works just dandy. You set it up as a VM instead of a Container.

Re:OpenVZ

[certain death]

My bad, I should have said ProxMox, it uses OpenVZ as well as KVM.

Re:OpenVZ

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenVZ is fine for open source but what if the poster is heterosexual? What is he to do in that case? Odds are that he's not a dick smoker.

Re:OpenVZ

[Anonymous Coward]

I second Proxmox. A super painless way to setup KVM and the web based GUI is great. Not to mention the fact that you can cluster them together for redundancy. It is aboout as close as you can get to an enterprise ready virtualization cluster for free. I have 20 production virtual servers running on it. Super rock solid http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Main_Page

Re:OpenVZ

[corychristison]

You're confusing the management UI with the virtualization/containerization technology.

Also, as stated, the poster wants something he can fiddle with on a Windows host and a possible move to Linux in the future.

Re:OpenVZ

[sjames]

When you're using OpenVZ, the host should be considered to be a management system. Any actual production software should run in a container.

It was a great option at one time when a true hypervisor and VM carried a big performance penalty, but with modern hypervisors, especially when the host CPU has virtualization instructions the real thing makes a lot more sense.

Re:OpenVZ

[myowntrueself]

When you're using OpenVZ, the host should be considered to be a management system. Any actual production software should run in a container.

It was a great option at one time when a true hypervisor and VM carried a big performance penalty, but with modern hypervisors, especially when the host CPU has virtualization instructions the real thing makes a lot more sense.

Maybe you run nrpe (for monitoring) on the host and the guests? There are LOTS of things you might want to run on both host and guests.

Re:OpenVZ

[allo]

colinux is the way to go, if he just wants some linux on windows.

Re:OpenVZ

[allo]

linux-vserver mixes processes from inside and outside, openvz is a bit better virtualization.

Re:OpenVZ

[Anonymous Coward]

He's using a Windows host machine. Also plans to use multiple Windows Guest VM's... OpenVZ doesn't work for either situation.

KVM is as bare metal you can get, but setup isn't always easy and requires a Linux Host. KVM is my personal preference but VirtualBox is probably best for his use case. VMware Workstation is great too but not free (last I checked - may have changed).

Thank you.

VirtualBox

[osprey413]

My first experience was setting up a BackTrack5 machine in VirtualBox. Extremely easy, and lots of information online if you have a question.

The ultimate virtual machine is...

[Anonymous Coward]

DOSbox...it plays my old games....OK, maybe you mean a more modern VM....geesh, I wish you had said that! LOL!

Virtualbox

[Anonymous Coward]

To start, virtualbox.
Its free, supports linux and windows and freebsd. (And Solaris!! Oh boy!!!) It's also easy to use and works well. For desktop use I'd choose it over whatever desktop product vmware is selling, even if I got it for free.

Microsoft has a free desktop visualization product too but it's documentation is sparse, and it has wierd limitations. It also pretty much only runs windows.

Vmware ESX is a damn nice piece of software, but it required dedicated hardware (hypervisor only! Local console is config and diagnostics only. Can't see your VM's on the local monitor) They have a free version and I use it for everything from my router software to windows instances to a minecraft server.. All on one phisical machine.

There's a free version of hyper-v (The microsoft coutnerpart to esx) but it's setup is downright difficult if you're not in a domain environment.

Virtualbox

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtualbox is what you want as a begginer or desktop for fooling around.
If you want to host a large infrastructure you would go VMware and for VPS hosting you would go XEN.
If you are into embedded systems, exotic architectures, reverse engineering and such you would rather use Qemu/KVM under linux.

They all have fundamentally the same features, you can still run any linux flavour and hook up a debugger on serial port or whatever funny thing you like to do witch each of them.
Virtualbox works out of the box and is the most convenient for running multiple windows/linux/*nix on your usual operating system though.

VMware

[Anonymous Coward]

VMware is easy to use, widely documented and will run almost anything out in the market place. The system you install it becomes a VMware server and you can only install guest. If you want to run a base os like windows or linux, Mac then VirtualBox is good and free.

Good for personal use, not for business

[Anonymous Coward]

VMWare and VirtualBox are indeed very easy to use. I haven't used Virtualbox for a while, but I used to have some issues running Linux on it. If you are looking to learn Virtualization in a professional sense, I would look into learning somethign useful like vSphere though.

VMware

[Anonymous Coward]

Hands down.

Get wrokstation for Linux, or Fusion.

Even better yet, use ESXi, and use workstation to toss your machines around.

Always thick provision though.

Virtual Box is _OK_, but the guest add-ons suck.

Xen is a mess when compared to VMware.
Xen is not elegant, it is annoying.

Unless you get Citrix Xen or a fork of Xen that is improved. But that means money.

I personally use VMware workstation on Linux, Fusion on OSX and ESXi for production.

VirtualBox or VM Workstation

[PraiseBob]

VirtualBox is the easiest free option to get started.
It can run inside a host OS, so you don't need a bare metal install, and don't need a web interface to use it.
It has easy to install and operate clients in Windows and Linux (can't speak for Mac).
It can build VM's easily. (VMWare free options cannot create VM's)

If you are willing to spend a little money, the VMWare Workstation is more powerful and offers similar features to those above, but better resource management in general.

Re:VirtualBox or VM Workstation

[SilentChasm]

Your knowledge of VMware is a bit out of date.

VMware player can create virtual machines (and has for some time) and it is still free. It works well on Windows and Linux hosts.

Re:VirtualBox or VM Workstation

[H0p313ss]

It has easy to install and operate clients in Windows and Linux (can't speak for Mac)

Works great on OSX, just the other day I whipped up a FreeBSD vm on my macbook to test something for a customer.

Re:VirtualBox or VM Workstation

[H0p313ss]

Your knowledge of VMware is a bit out of date.

VMware player can create virtual machines (and has for some time) and it is still free. It works well on Windows and Linux hosts.

That's good to know, I've been avoiding VMWare outside of work for that reason. How long has this been the case?

Re:VirtualBox or VM Workstation

[HybridST]

I'll just leave this here...

Re:VirtualBox or VM Workstation

[H0p313ss]

Yes, that's been around forever, but in 2005 it could not CREATE vms, when did that start?

Re:VirtualBox or VM Workstation

[RicktheBrick]

I have VMware on this computer. I just downloaded the latest version. I am running vista and have installed xp on vmware. I did this because I have several games that will not run on vista or 7. They will not even run on windows xp after a certain update. I do not know which but they will run on windows xp with no service packs. The only way I can install a program is on the cd drive since it will not access my network or any usb flash drive. It will get on the internet but like I said before the only use I get out of it is the ability to run some old games.

Re:VirtualBox or VM Workstation

[H0p313ss]

Looks like since 2009, so three years.

Re:VirtualBox or VM Workstation

[Malc]

It also runs on OS X, although VMWare Fusion isn't free. I use it most days. VMs are portable to other host OSes either.

I don't get this VirtualBox is easier than VMWare business. I haven't used VB, but the VMWare desktop products are so easy to use that I don't see there being much scope to make it easier.

Virtualbox

[Anonymous Coward]

VirtualBox hands down.

Hyper-v in Windows 8

[sofakingon]

I've been working with VMware since ESX 3.5. It's still my virtualization platform of choice, but on my desktop, I now run Hyper-v. It's included as a role in Windows 8, and is painless to install and configure.

Re:Hyper-v in Windows 8

[Billly Gates]

Can Hyper-V support virtual networks that are host only? One of the cool things about VMWare is I can setup a virtual network to test out Windows 2012 server and Windows XP/7 clients and Exchange installations by making them all host-only and interacting with each other ala a virtual network.

Can you do this under Windows 8 or is it just one copy or multiple copies of win 7 that can't communicate?

Re:Hyper-v in Windows 8

[thoth]

I use Hyper-V at work since I need to have a bunch of Windows VMs around. It's pretty nice. But I tried installing linux, either Fedora or Ubuntu, and it bombed out. Plus it ties you to Windows.

Since the poster mentioned possibly moving to a linux host in the future, and also mentioned wanting to run linux VMs, I'd rule Hyper-V right out of consideration.

I'd go with VirtualBox just on cost alone. If that doesn't suit your (poster's) needs, then you can shell out some money for VMWare.
Xen is not the way to go for beginners. For that I'd buy the "Art of Xen" book and come back to it later.

Re:Hyper-v in Windows 8

[jt-socal]

I was using Virtual Box and recently switched to Hyper-v. Hyper-V makes it easy to start machines automatically at boot. Also, my CentOS 6.3 vbox runs great, especially with these Linux Integration Components installed: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34603. Hyper-V seems faster, but have not measured.

Re:Hyper-v in Windows 8

[jt-socal]

Yes there are three types of Virtual Switches in Hyper-V. http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/networking/how-to-create-an-external-virtual-switch-in-hyper-v-on-the-windows-server-8-beta/5410

Re:Hyper-v in Windows 8

[Chemisor]

Unfortunately, to use hyper-v you have to use Windows 8, which is not painless.

Re:Hyper-v in Windows 8

[Billly Gates]

That is Windows Server 2012. Not WIndows 8. For some retarded reason MS named it Windows Server 8 but it has nothing to do with Windows Server 2012 other than using a similiar kernel.

Re:Hyper-v in Windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

or with RSAT in Windows 7, and yes Hyper-V can support any network you choose provided you jump through the right hoops. The real question is can VMWare support any set of RAID drivers that windows can?

Re:Hyper-v in Windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

VMWare Workstation is pretty great if you need to do anything complicated network-wise. I use it at work for testing vCenter conversions, and I've also used it to experiment with bringing up different utility servers. If you plan to do anything more complicated than bring up a Linux VM and play with Linux then Workstation is very handy do to the isolation and subnetting features that you have with the Virtual Network Editor.

I'm sure other products have it too.

Also VMWare Fusion is an excellent product on the Mac. It's much more tightly integrated with Mac OS than anything else I've seen. I haven't done much work with Parallels though.

Re:Hyper-v in Windows 8

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm no, hyper-v has been available since Server 2008

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-V

What's your goal?

[Anonymous Coward]

"To learn the use of virtual machines?"

This doesn't really mean anything. What's your real goal?

If you want to be able to run multiple OS combinations in order to learn more about OS configurations, that's a goal.
If you want to learn how to program with management tools like Chef, that's a goal.
If you want to abstract some service (to make it independent from the hardware), that's a goal.

Virtualization provides two things:
1 - Isolation from the physical hardware.
2 - Management of the system independent from the hardware (i.e. you can move a VM from one physical host to another, you can copy/clone a VM, etc.)

What is it you're trying to do? It makes a difference in what recommendations make sense!

VirtualBox is free-ish, which is attractive if you want to play on your desktop, i.e. to just have multiple OS for you to "play" with.
VMWare ESXi is free-ish, but takes over the computer it's running on. Really great launchpad if you want to learn about management (it's the exact same as the full fledged vSphere, separated only by a license key), but really annoying if you want to use the computer to do something else (other than virtualization)
Xen is a great free alternative to ESX, but not quite as polished (IMO)
If you're on a Mac and just want to do some desktop stuff, then both parallels and vmware fusion work well (and on Windows or Linux, VMWare Workstation works well)

I'm sure there are other options as well, but it's hard to recommend one without understanding what you're actually trying to _do_......

Depends upon your actual goals.

[Anonymous Coward]

VMware and VirtualBox are really the two most common and will be the most usable for beginners and the most likely to be used in a workplace environment. If this is for personal use only though, and you don't need the skills to later translate directly into a work environment then Xen or QEMU are really better options depending on the goal of the project. Arguably, neither is as simple to get into as VMware or VirtualBox but both offer more versatility, and QEMU in particular provides a more "under the hood" experience as well a suite of tools for translating virtual machines/disks from one format to another. None of which really matters though if all you want to do is get a "push here dummy" virtual machine up and running. In which case I'd go with VirtualBox, but if you want to learn (and at times pull out your hair) I'd opt for QEMU.

I really wish /. editors would stop pushing questions that don't provide the kind of details one needs to provide an informed answer, rather than the sort of popularity contest questions we keep seeing.

VirtualBox for platform agnosticy

[Anonymous Coward]

VirtualBox gives you the best cross-platform experience: No matter what your host platform is, the UI will be (close to) the same. This might matter, if you want your host to be Windows (at work), Linux (at home) or Mac (Notebook) and carry your VMs around e.g. on an eSATA or USB3 drive.

Re:VirtualBox for platform agnosticy

[Anonymous Coward]

the UI will be (close to) the same

And that only matters if you actually want to use the UI...it's entirely usable with no UI. The biggest selling point of VirtualBox, for me, is Vagrant. I like to script my VMs and Vagrant allows me to do that very easily and in a way that allows our team to collaborate on shared VM configurations without sharing the actual VMs.

I would recommend

[Anonymous Coward]

ANy of them you fucking idiot.

Just explained to my wife you don't ask questions like that on slashdot.

Really.

[Andy Prough]

How dare someone ask a software preference question on /. Doesn't he know this is a politics/religion website?

Re:Really.

[ae1294]

I suggest DESQview...

Re:Really.

[couchslug]

"Software preference" clearly falls under "politics/religion"!

Re:Really.

[Andy Prough]

I suggest DESQview...

Nah - looks and acts too much like OSX. He's looking for something modern.

Re:Really.

[rrohbeck]

"Software preference" clearly falls under "politics/religion"!

Only Emacs.
Preferring Vim is 100% rational.

(Ducks...)

Re:Really.

[Z00L00K]

EDIT /TPU

Re:Really.

[rrohbeck]

Bah. Zealot.
EDIT /EDT is the only way on VMS!

Re:Really.

[Xtifr]

Bah! Ed is the standard text editor!

Re:Really.

[xystren]

And I suppose doubleDos is out of the question also???

Re:Really.

[hughbar]

Bah, new fangled screens and stuff, never catch on, the only real way is a manual card punch: http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/X1271.96

Re:Really.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Software preference" clearly falls under "politics/religion"!

Only Emacs.
Preferring Vim is 100% rational.

(Ducks...)

You forgot to hit escape, you're still in drooling fanboy mode.

VirtualBox

[X3J11]

I too recommend VirtualBox. I use it on my desktop Win 7 machine as well as my four year old notebook running Linux Mint. The fact that it's more-or-less free, and essentially identical on both platforms is a definite advantage. Thus far I've used it to play with various LInux distributions and FreeDOS/MS-DOS. I've even been messing with Windows 98 SE and OS/2 Warp lately, although they required a bit of head scratching to get running.

I use vbox

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtualbox has crappy 3d support and the virtualized usb works.... sometimes... mostly...
That said, the python/c++ api they made for it is insanely complete (even if it lacks good documentation). I can control the most minute aspect of a running VM.

It is also (mostly) open source...

If you don't care about this, install the oses you care about in vmware and vbox and see which runs better. Nothing beats first hand experience.

VMWare, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

VMWare is simple and easy for beginners and there is a lot of third part support for things like VM backups that are also free.

https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=free-esxi5&lp=default

I use VMWare at home on a HP DC7700 business desktop that I picked up that my work was giving away and I have it in our lab at work running on those same type of desktops. I have 6GB ram in them. My home ESXi has 3 network cards. I run my IPCOP router on one card, my "blue" network on another, and my "green" on the third. One cheap desktop running ESXi replaced my white box IPCOP router and allows me to run 4 additional general purpose virtual machines as well. I currently have Ubuntu, 2 Windows 7 machines, and 2 XP machines on it now but not all run at the same time. The internal SATA disk in it is kindof slow but I mount another VMFS via NFS from a second Linux machine. None of that is required though.

If ESX comes with support for all of your hardware, setting it up is literally, sticking in the CD, booting it, configuring a console IP and network settings and the password. Unplg the monitor and KB and you are done. The rest it through the client which you can download directly from the ESX server web interface. If you have hardware that is not built into the kernel, you may be able to find the drivers or you are out of luck.

I've been using ESX in very large production environments for over 7 years so my idea of easy to setup and use may be a little biased because I am used to it.

I also maintain HyperV clusters, it works but no where near the ease of setup.

VirtualBox

[Anonymous Coward]

Definitely VirtualBox. You can literially download an operating system's ISO,fire up VirtualBox, hit "Next" a couple of times and you're done. You don't have to know jack about virtual machines to use it and the menus are very user friendly. It's not something I'd use for serious work, but for learning the ropes it can't be beat.

VMware and VBox seem slow.

[Andy Prough]

I've got so much bare metal laying around, these days I've been installing onto a box and accessing it remotely - native performance is much nicer.

Re:VMware and VBox seem slow.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two reasons to use a VM:

1) You have a bunch of crappy software which doesn't play well in a shared environment

2) You do development and like having the ability to easily juggle different environment configurations, or to have a bunch of different systems for portability testing

"Native system performance" is really sort of irrelevant. Although, VMs have become so prevalent that not writing crappy software appears to be a dropping lower on people's priority list.

Re:VMware and VBox seem slow.

[MightyMartian]

There is a third; portability. This is particularly true of Windows, which often doesn't play nicely when you move it to new hardware. Using the VM server as a hardware abstraction layer certainly costs some performance, but I can move guests from SATA to SCSI, Intel to AMD and the hardware is completely abstracted.

Re:VMware and VBox seem slow.

[symbolset]

Hypervisor overhead has not really been a problem for five years or so. Baseline host tin these days is 24 threads/12 cores, 192 GB RAM, Dual port 10Gbe and dual 8Gbps FC or dual 10Gbps FCOE, and some SSD backed storage. It's the cost of that storage bandwidth that is holding things up now, and less so the network bandwidth - not CPU and RAM.

The surplus gear I use for test/dev is a few old boxes with dual X5550's and 96GB and quad gigabit. It sounds like you're trying to make do with some ancient P4 Desktops. You may want to look at the recent AMD desktop chips instead. You can get 8 modern cores, 24GB RAM, and enough SSD to do test/dev for under $600. That would probably be more temporally relevant and informative without blowing your budget. You're not going to learn a lot about modern server hypervisors on desktop gear from ten years ago.

Re:VMware and VBox seem slow.

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

Oh yeah... That's my baseline tin.... Yeah, that's the ticket...

Re:VMware and VBox seem slow.

[mlts]

I have a couple reasons that I use VMs.

#3 can be similar to #1 in the fact that it is crappy software, but I like doing Web browsing in a VM just because when I roll back to a snapshot, all changes/malware are gone. Especially if the Web browser is running as a user in the client OS. Yes, hypervisors can be penetrated, but it is a steep climb from user mode to admin rights, to punching through the hypervisor, to a useful context in the host machine. Not impossible, but a lot more difficult than running it as a user. This also provides me security from permanent cookies and other shared objects that might be left around. When the VM rolls back, all that is gone. Of course, this can be accomplished by other means like jails, but it is better than nothing.

4: This is similar to #2. I have some programs which I like keeping in their own environment for safekeeping, and that I will know that future hardware will be able to run the code. I have used programs that have became business critical, which ended up having problems with later OS releases. Take my Quickbooks installation. It resides in its own VM because I can shut the VM down on one machine, tote the physical HDD it is on to another, fire it up, and do work there. Backups are as simple as copying the virtual HDD image that holds just the documents (which is encrypted and automounted in the VM client OS,) to offsite storage every so often, or mounting the HD image, copying the files to a TC volume, and uploading the TC volume. Plus, this also gives me the ability to roll back to many times with automatic snapshots, so that is another backup layer which is useful.

5: Separation of tasks. Yes, I can use user accounts, but it is a decent way to be able to do work for one project, and keep everything related to that in one place.

Re:VMware and VBox seem slow.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got Windows7 in a KVM on fedora and the "Windows Experience Index" score for the processor is 5.0., and I'm running it on a six-year old Laptop, Thinkpad W500-P9600-6M-L2 ; p

Re:VMware and VBox seem slow.

[Larryish]

My baseline tin is solid gold, baybeeee!

A lot of Pentium 4 machines from 7 or 8 years ago, running a mix of Debian-based distros with a gig or less of ram and hard drives 160 gigs or smaller.

Oh yeah....

Re:VMware and VBox seem slow.

[timeOday]

Obviously depends on what you want to do. 3d Graphics on VMWare Fusion (for the Mac) does not work well - mainly problems with bugs, not (just) speed. Google Earth plugin for example is not usable because the controls do not render at all.

Re:VMware and VBox seem slow.

[symbolset]

Every solution available has advantages and disadvantages.

Re:VMware and VBox seem slow.

[BLKMGK]

What software are you using to virtualize? VMware or other? I like the idea of a VM for specific software packages, Virtualbox would work well for that or VMplayer...

Re:VMware and VBox seem slow.

[symbolset]

For VMHosts for customers who need that, yeah. Obviously that's not for small business or bare metal servers.

Re:VMware and VBox seem slow.

[symbolset]

BTW: "slinging tin" is a trade term.

Re:VMware and VBox seem slow.

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

I have an I-7 2600K system with 16 GB. My SSD is an Intel 520 Series.

Is there any hope for my soul?

Last time I swung my tin my wife laughed at me.

Re:VMware and VBox seem slow.

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

(To the OP)

VMware is easy to use and is free, as in beer. One of its strengths is that virtual disks can be moved about and that makes it easy to create virtual appliances. There're a ton of them out there on the net, mostly Linux distros tailored for a specific use. I've fooled around a bit with VBox and it's OK. Its performance is not on the same level with VMware. Or you could try Zen. Or attach electrodes to your feet like they did to Ham.

For me, as a desktop Linux user, VMware has been the mac-daddy killer app. There's not much reason to boot to Windows these days except for games, and I've found that what won't run under wine will usually run in VMware with a Windblows guest. Also, there were some kernel taint problem associated with VirtualBox that've been probably fixed by now.

On the other hand, if you're planning on running OS/2 in your guest, then Vbox is the only way to go! I learned that a couple of months ago.

Re:VMware and VBox seem slow.

[AmiMoJo]

Electricity isn't free though. Might as well add more RAM to one box and run multiple VMs, or at least multiple services on the same box.

Re:VMware and VBox seem slow.

[AmiMoJo]

Also kind of misses the point about VMs - they are hardware independent. If one of your old boxes dies you can just move the VM imagine to a new one, no need to to reinstall or reconfigure.

Re:VMware and VBox seem slow.

[mitzampt]

google virtual appliances... both VirtualBox and VMware have awesome examples of VMs for specific software environments pre-packaged

Re:VMware and VBox seem slow.

[drsmithy]

It's the cost of that storage bandwidth that is holding things up now, and less so the network bandwidth - not CPU and RAM.

Storage _bandwidth_ ? What are you regularly saturating 16Gb of FC with ?

Re:VMware and VBox seem slow.

[BeanThere]

3) It's easier to keep a dedicated server task running if the underlying hardware fails, by just transferring the VM over to a different host

Re:VMware and VBox seem slow.

[BeanThere]

But how do you keep your systems cool with all that hot air around?

Re:VMware and VBox seem slow.

[symbolset]

Obviously the physical media necessary to saturate that costs a lot of money. SAN SSD is not cheap yet.

NOT VirtualBox

[Dan East]

This negative comment was necessary to counterbalance the huge number of positive comments that are recommending VirtualBox. It's a yin-yang thing.

Re:NOT VirtualBox

[jittles]

Seriously. Where are all the Microsoft Virtual PC fans? There has to be at least one out there.

Re:NOT VirtualBox

[mcl630]

I doubt it. Avoid VPC like the plague.

Re:NOT VirtualBox

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, totally! And did almost everyone forget that it's under Oracle now? Although I hear they're actually not trying drastically to kill it off and assimilate it to the borg.

Re:NOT VirtualBox

[vlueboy]

I used to be one in '98 back when it was a way to let your Mac emulate Windows world under MacOS 8.

Its maker, Connectix never implemented USB support. MS didn't much care either after buying and rebranding it, several versions later.

Once we realized that VM's are the easy way to test multiple distros in a short time*, thanks to the KDE / Ubuntu GUI crazy-fest, VirtualBox provided the desired USB support.

I tried installing VPC2007 (or 2008?) recently and had trouble on my Windows 7 setup, and google searches reported that even MS doesn't support 64 bit setups. Given how universal 64 bit processors have been for ages, I realized it was time to abandon that sinking ship. I think there's NO newer version of the product, sort-of like IE5 and IE6 were left to rot.

* VM's are wonderful distro test-beds. No rebooting, no CD burning thanks to ISO emulation (not a feature in MS VPC, by the way), you can freeze and thaw if you're not done testing. You can also use rebooing and RAM allocations to see how little RAM the OS works can take. Depending on your setup, you can load several side-by-side and look at relative performance of desktop environments. You'll still need to reboot with a Live CD or Live USB to test the ever shifty Wifi and Video acceleration support, though. Push comes to shove? Just keep the distro in a VM forever.

Re:NOT VirtualBox

[BeanThere]

Friday evening / Saturday morning - the shills have clocked out

Maybe the goal is the most simple one??

[RobertLTux]

its similar to the great answer of JFGI when given an answer maybe this person needs to do some ground work in VMs just so that he can ask questions in an intelligent manner before dropping money on %stuff%.

a challenge for the Slashmind

where can i find a Blender material set for download that includes Silk, Satin and Velvet?? (bonus points if you know where the blendermats collection can be downloaded NOT FROM ESNIPS.COM)

please note only actual live download links will work

Re:Maybe the goal is the most simple one??

[symbolset]

Not sure I followed that entirely, but I (too?) would like a like a link to some Public Domain Blender 3d models. And yes, this is off topic.

Re:Maybe the goal is the most simple one??

[Anonymous Coward]

What happens when you blend silk, satin and velvet together? Are you planning on printing out the materials on a 3d printer after you download them?

VirtualBox in Xen or Xen in VirtualBox

[Anonymous Coward]

Ive used most of the mentioned VM solutions - VirtualBox and VMWare are just install-and-go. VBox seems the best for hassle-free try-it - especially if layered on a supported platform (VMs on Linux are at the mercy of the kernel changing on every release).

I would echo the sentiment that try one -- any one; learn it foibles or limitations (you may be hard pressed to find them), and if unhappy, try another.

I recently tried to get virtualbox to run inside Xen. It wont. But Xen inside VirtualBox - was impressed it worked enough to debug a problem at the kernel level, and I use VMWare for some things (keep running out of disk with so many vms).

The only one I havent tried is OpenVZ - may have to try that one day

LMAO

[Andy Prough]

That was awesome

Re:LMAO

[Anonymous Coward]

What, the comment or the cat flavoured dog food? Makes me hungry.

Hypervisor

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have a spare machine that you can use uiu really can't beat ESXi. It is fast easy and no knowledge is required on most machines. It has great support for most hardware.

I would street clear of desktop virtualization, unless you have a heafty desktop. You will get so much better performance out of something that is bare metal and you can try all of them to see what is best for you.

The systems that I hear most in the enterprise are VMware, Hyper V, KVMand VirtulBox.

I wouldn't go down an unknown or non enterprise path if I were you so your knowledge from this is transferrable to your paycheck and your results are easily reproduced.

VirtualBox

[Anonymous Coward]

For beginners, hands down, VBox.

Virtualized gaming?

[Anonymous Coward]

What VM solutions would I be best served by if I wanted a virtual windows 7 machine to game on? I was recommended Xen initially. Is it possible to achieve nearly the same performance as a standalone system if I purchase the right hardware?

Re:Virtualized gaming?

[corychristison]

KVM recently introduced PCI passthru. If you buy a second card you can pass it through to the guest and it can utilize it 100%.

The downside is that you either need a second monitor, or have a monitor with multiple inputs and will have to manually switch your screen input (not a bad solution though).

I honestly don't know how stable this is nor have i tried it.

Re:Virtualized gaming?

[LeftyBSD]

It is difficult to get PCI passthrough get working with modern hardware - especially using libvirt. I upgraded my main rig to a 6-core AMD about a week ago with two video cards purely to run Windows in a virtualized environment with its own dedicated passthrough card. I wanted to stop dual booting and run Ubuntu as my main OS, as it's also my main OS on my work machine. I specifically bought a chip and board that support IOMMU for exactly this reason. (Not that I'm complaining about the upgrade, it's a big jump from the older Core 2-based chip and board I had before.) The goal was to eliminate the secondary workstation on my desk, and use one (beefy) machine for both gaming and everyday productivity such as coding/compiling, watching movies, SSH out to various places, etc. A week later, having patched both the latest libvirt and KVM sources, I still cannot get either the Radeon HD5870 or the Nvidia GT520 to pass through to a VM. Part of the problem is that most (all?) modern cards have more than one PCI function on the bus (VGA adapter, and usually an HDMI audio device) which makes libvirt very unhappy - it won't (without patches) let you detach the device from the host OS when there are devices sharing the bus. I patched around this issue eventually. The next problem I encountered is that if a device employs GART (so, basically, every video card since AGP 1.0), it's unlikely to work with KVM. I also can't get past the fact that KVM refuses to enable the passthrough device if it shares an IRQ with anything. Really? In 2012, on a *brand* *new* motherboard, I have to start worrying about IRQ assignment conflicts? My board unfortunately does not have any options in the (mildly irritating EFI) BIOS setup for reassigning IRQs manually, either. Damn, looks like KVM is a no-go. I even tried a very recent version of VirtualBox, as it supports PCI passthrough as well, but GART again rears its ugly head, and VMs with graphics cards attached lock up fairly early in the boot process - my guess is when the guest OS tries to init the graphics card's PCI resources. VMware supports PCI passthrough for devices such as RAID and network cards - IF you run a fairly recent ESX hypervisor on the bare metal. Which would mean that my main workstation AND the gaming rig would be VMs, so I'd have to keep a separate box around just to run the vSphere client to access my machine. I didn't even bother going down this route, as there was no mention in any of the docs I could get my hands on. It may work with a very specific combination of hardware and software, but you'd better do a shitload of research before diving into the PCI passthrough world. I ended up sticking with Windows 7 on the box simply so I didn't have to give up my various Windows-only games, and keeping my secondary workstation around so it could run Ubuntu. HTH.

VMware

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you want to remain ignorant than pick one that has few options and is dummied down for a beginner. Or you could pick what businesses use and want to see on a resume. I use Virtualbox and VMware at home as I have different needs that each provide. But VMware is my choice as it is faster and offers more options.

Beginner beginner?

[jdkc4d]

Look around the internet and see if you can find some free virtual machines somewhere that you can download. Vmware used to offer some, I expect the still do. Go with whatever software the VM is made for. Just to get your feet wet, to get you an idea of whats going on. You can branch out from there. There are lots of virtualization suites. Once you are comfortable playing with those, try building one yourself. It's not difficult, but having an example to refer might be helpful. It's not that hard, but good luck anyway.

What I started with

[mrmaster]

Virtualbox was my first hands-on experience with virtual machines. Easy to use and free. VMWare Workstation is really nice but pricey for home use. VMWare Player has worked in spots where Virtualbox has not. It was just one issue but it cost me a lot of wasted time. Once you are comfortable with products like virtualbox or VMware workstation/player the next step would be something like Xen or ESX.

VMware player

[Andy Prough]

Its free

Re:VMware player

[Golden_Rider]

The free hypervisor is here: http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/overview.html

You'll need a license key, which you can also get (for free of course) on that website.

Re:VMware player

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, of course you mean free as in free beer...
This is no free software. I rather go for the GPL version of VirtualBox :
'apt-get install virtualbox' on any debian based distribution,
I don't mention using kvm-qemu + virt-manager as the OP wants to experiment on Windows first, but that would have some advantages when installing linux distros, eg using tools like vmbuilder to automate the creation of guest environment.

Re:VMware player

[Anonymous Coward]

So are ESXi and VMware Server...
only vcenter server (the management server for VMware ESX) need a paid license.

I'm running ESXi at home on one Proliant DL385 and a QNAP TurboNAS Pro without any real problems... You of course miss the sexy features: cloning, deploying from templates and cluster features like VMotion and Distributed switches but those are irrelevant in single host setups.

Re:VMware player

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not free. You have to give them contact information to trade for the license key.

Re:VMware player

[Anonymous Coward]

The only problem with Hypervisor is in the setup he seemed to be describing is he plans on using his Desktop to run these virtual machines, and ESXi is it's own OS, and you can't control or connect to your VM boxes from the host, so it's not ideal for a setup where everything is running off of one machine. However, it's an amazing next step when he's ready to move his VM boxes off his desktop and onto a dedicated system. I run two ESXi hosts at my house. It's easy to use.

Who cares? Its not rocket science.

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, I really really don't see why people make VMs out to be the big deal that they are.

VMware gives you all the tools for Vsphere/ESXi to use a GUI with it, sure they have their own commands, but seriously they have dumbed everything down so much that is pretty painless to manage pretty much anything from a Windows, Mac, or Linux desktop.

Just finished my CCNA and didn't see what the big deal was about the cert to be honest. Realistically you can look everything up online. They even recommend in the books that you subnet using websites that do all of the work for you.

mod! down

[Anonymous Coward]

fear the rea4er else to be an

What do you mean by "learn"?

[mewyn]

Virtual machines are just a "computer within a computer", there's nothing about virtual machines per se that you won't really know from using modern computers. You will need to know specifics on software packages and tools for those packages, but those are very specific to the brand of virtualizing that you're doing.

Learning "virtual machines" is kind of meaningless in and of itself, and unless you have a pressing need to become an expert in a specific package, don't tie yourself to anything specific. If you're just trying to run linux and windows (or something similar) just do it; or if you're planning on an OS zoo, do that.

As far as desktop software goes, virtualbox is decent for free; but I've found it to be unstable if it's pushed too hard. Vmware workstation is much more stable, but a pain to pony up the cost.

Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, this gets complicated and there's professionals that do this...it's good for you to learn. And I'm going to get downmodded, but I'm an AC so I don't give a damn.

You're asking about virtualization, you know what it is. So you're either competent, or you're some MCSE that needs to be babysat to learn how to wipe his own ass without taking the network down.

That stated
* If you can't figure out virtualbox, you're an idiot.
* If you can't figure out vmware player, you're probably an idiot -- but maybe you thought it would let you set up machines instead of just run them.
* If you can't figure out vmware workstation, you're an idiot
* If you can't figure out vsphere or ESXI, you don't know how to use google. Start with vmware player or workstation and try again later.
* If you can't figure out Xen, you haven't tried to read the damned instructions or checked Google for ten minutes.

Finally, I suspect -- but have not verified that if you can't figure out HyperV, you probably also have something wrong with you.

Now, if you're trying to do something beyond just run them and do the basics, your questions might get interesting. Setting up hot failover, shared storage, snapshot management... these would be good questions. You've just asked the damned equivalent of how to install an operating system or start word and betrayed that you haven't even tried it, or aren't competent enough to try it.

It's literally a 10 minute task from install to running a new VM to do all of these in the basic non hardware hypervisor platforms.

Figure it the fuck out and come back with real questions.

VMWare and Virtualbox are both pretty simple...

[bemymonkey]

... self-explanatory really. Just try 'em out. I'd recommend VMWare for Windows clients because the integration feels a bit more polished, but you can't really go wrong with either one.

There's more than one?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't consider myself a beginner but I thought VMware dominated this industry. It's all I ever use.

Try them all

[nurb432]

Then decide.

Re:Try them all

[camperdave]

Try them all, Then decide.

Why re-invent the wheel? If, in the collective wisdom and experience of Slashdotdom, Brand_X sucks, and Brand_Y is the one to go with, then why should the poster be told to try Brand_X?

Warning! (Non-Douche Answer Contained Within Post)

[ski9826]

I use both VirtualBox and VMware Workstation. I prefer the VMware, but VirtualBox is free...I like free...so, for personal use, of those 2 options, I would use VurtualBox.

Virtualboxes

[Anonymous Coward]

A very cool thing about Virtual Box is that you can download several images pre-installed with free OS's. Sometimes the guest additions are already even installed for you. Its a great way to see why this "FreeBSD" is all about, or try out some more exotic OS's, like, ReactOS. Just download the file and point a new virtual machine to it. Get the images here.

sure fire way...

[Anonymous Coward]

I recommend using kvm on a 32-bit host & then swearing for hours at the machine because it doesn't work & finally banging your head on the keyboard until it's so full of blood that it don't work neither...

Always start with free...

[sootman]

... if the option is even halfway decent. In this case, start with Virtual Box. It runs, and runs inside, all major platforms. If you have a Linux ISO or Windows CD you can go from zero to a working VM in about 30 minutes. There's nearly no learning curve to get your first VM up and running, and IF it doesn't fit your needs, you can start looking to see if it has options that you aren't aware of, followed by looking at alternatives.

That said, VirtualBox has fit my needs (mainly testing) just fine for years. VM software is like word processors: they're all pretty comparable and 90% of people's needs can be met by any one of them.

Hyper-V

[Anonymous Coward]

For Windows hosts, Get Win8 Pro Upgrade for $40 and Hyper-V is available at no extra charge. Just enable and reboot. I installed Debian Wheezy on it two days ago. Runs great. With CentOS (or RedHat or Windows or SUSE) guests, you get the Windows Integration Services guest tools, and with a little work, you can use them on Debian and (I hear) Ubuntu. Rumor has it that Microsoft is going to add Debian "officially" at some future date, but I'm skeptical about that one.

Before learning something NEW asking ?s is sma

[raymorris]

If the OP knew a lot about circulation, he could look at different hypervisors and interfaces and make an informed choice. Since he's not real familiar with topic, he would only be judging which has the best sales pitch. He's trying to decide which one to learn on. Since he doesn't understand rhe field well enough to make informed judgement, asking those who DO is smart. It's a very good question. I bet you're the arrogant fool exec who chose IIS as the proxy server based on "feature lists" rather than asking the geeks who actually know about such things.

Re:Before learning something NEW asking ?s is sma

[SQLGuru]

This is the type of response I would spend mod points on if I had them. On the Internet, you can either be helpful or a troll (or a lurker) and people who choose to be a troll are really annoying.

Re:Before learning something NEW asking ?s is sma

[belmolis]

Hear, hear. I wish I had mod points. I'm amazed and disappointed at the nasty responses to this perfectly reasonable question.

VMWare Workstation

[wadeal]

VMWare Workstation is better than full blown Hyper V even IMO:

Better inter-connectivity with your desktop (IE. copy and paste works 100%).

Better video performance.

Better usability (it isn't the same key combination for ctrl alt del as will lock the host unlike Hyper V if you're RDPd).

Better network configuration BY FAR (Last time I checked you can configure 10 virtual networks, each with DHCP if required and as either NAT, Direct to your external network or Private).

But then VMWare Workstation costs about $200. If money is your main factor then buy Windows 8 with that $200 instead and have inbuilt Hyper V that will do basically what you want and have Windows 8 to learn as well (But you can always learn Windows 8 virtualized with the 180 day trial). Hyper V is a good product for it's price (free basically) and does do something things better (ie Console Connection, Memory Management etc).

If money isn't your main factor and you can afford $200 then I highly recommend buying VMWare Workstation - For what you want to do (visualize on your own desktop) it is the best product available by far.

Re:VMWare Workstation

[Anonymous Coward]

It should be noted that the free VMware Player has all of the features you mention (although getting "vmnetcfg" is a bit of a pain), *except* the better video performance, IIRC. But the better video performance is generally only required if you do something kooky like 3D in your VM.

Re:VMware Workstation

[Anonymous Coward]

For software test scenarios, I find VMware Workstation has just about everything you'd ever want. Its snapshotting feature is especially impressive, if you're diligent about it. Example: You install Windows, clean from the disc, that's a snapshot. Then you run Windows Update a zillion times to get everything up to date, that's a snapshot. Then say it asks you if you want to upgrade from Internet Explorer 7 to Internet Explorer 8. You do; that's a snapshot. Now you can flip back and forth between the two states of the VM; now you have IE7, now you have IE8. Now let's say you want to install something else in addition to the base Windows install. You can install it on both snapshots -- once on the IE7 state, and once on the IE8 state. Now the two VM states have diverged, and VMware forks them for you. You can then keep going, making new snapshots along each fork. And so on ... and you can actually navigate around your little branching tree of snapshots with a GUI, resetting the machine to the state you want, whenever you want. It's very useful. That said, it looks like the current list price is $250, so that might be out of range for someone who just wants it "for personal use."

Thank you.
Very good explanation of the snapshots.

VMWare is the only real option

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used and continue to use all of them. HyperV loves to lock up (the entire hypervisor) for no reason, VirtualBox is good but doesn't have the hardware support you're likely to want, and Xen is... ugh.. no. Just no.

If you have a spare machine laying around, try the free bare metal VMWare hypervisor, ESXi. I've used it in high-exposure, publicly accessible corporate environments, and currently use it both at home and on a dedicated machine I rent from limestonenetworks.com. At work, our entire infrastructure is virtualized with a licensed (i.e., paid for) three machine ESX cluster.

If you don't have a spare machine, my advice isn't likely to be popular, but it's the best solution when it comes to compatability, support, and performance: Install windows and buy a copy of VMWare Workstation for it. Workstation has a lot of great management features that the free ESX does not have as well.

Plenty of other options will "work", but none will work as well as VMWare, period.

Re:VMWare is the only real option

[mikeken]

Although I agree that Xen is a "no. Just no." for a beginner, you seem to have an attitude against it in a corporate/commercial world? Right from their website, "The Xen Hypervisor has a user base in the millions, that include cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Hosting, Linode". I use ESXi as well on an almost daily basis, but you seem to have drank the VMWare kool-aid. That or you are SUPER vendor locked in and so you've given up.

Re:VMWare is the only real option

[A bsd fool]

Post you're replying to was me, wasn't logged in (oops). I'm not "super locked in". We did pay (a fortune) for a "top of the line" VMWare license a few weeks ago, but we started off with the free stuff. I use free ESXi at home and remotely for personal virtualization as well. Xen is widely used, but if you'll pardon the phrase, it's widely used in limited "markets." Because it is paravirtualized-only, it requires guest OS support, and guests that don't support it will themselves not run. This includes most versions of Windows, all versions of FreeBSD (sans-hackery), many versions of NetBSD, and I think all versions of OpenBSD as well. As a BSD fanboy that must run a few windows servers for some things, this makes Xen next to worthless to me. It also lacks the awesome (albeit expensive) options available on ESX. The distributed switch is worth its weight in gold for performance reasons alone, and I only run 3 hosts in my HA/FT cluster. Speaking of which, ESX *has* HA/FT support. You could unplug the power cables from any server (or switch, or SAN device, or ...) in my network and there wouldn't even be a momentary service interruption. The internet connection is the only thing that isn't fully redundant. If you don't have the money for a license, ESXi is just as good as Xen. If you DO have the money, ESXi is much better than Xen.

Re:VMWare is the only real option

[A bsd fool]

Previous comment may have been a bit out of date. I haven't used Xen in a while, but it looks like they've gotten away from PV only and have added FT in the 4.x versions, which is a big step for them. I may have to give it a more recent spin for some benchmark comparisons etc.

As always, Betteridge has the answer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which Virtual Machine Software For a Beginner?

No.

Re:As always, Betteridge has the answer.

[xystren]

[Obligatory Most Interesting Man in the World Reference]

On Rollerblading/VM for Beginners

Stay Thirsty My Friends....

VMWare Fusion on OS X

[The Infamous Grimace]

I've been using VMWare Fusion on OS X for a few years to run WinXP & 7 as well as Ubuntu. It's gotten steadily better and faster over time, and I have no issues. I've also tried VirtualBox, used it on both OS X and Ubuntu hosts, and while it's good it's not as polished as Fusion. I've never used Parallels, but recent reviews tend to give it a slight advantage over Fusion.

I'd suggest that you try the demos for Fusion and Parallels, see if either is worth the cost or if the free alternative works well enough for your needs.

Re:VMWare Fusion on OS X

[Guy Harris]

I'd suggest that you try the demos for Fusion and Parallels, see if either is worth the cost or if the free alternative works well enough for your needs.

The original poster's going to start out using Windows as the host, and possibly switch to Linux later, so "VMware Workstation" rather than "VMware Fusion" is the name of the product they want to look at. For Parallels, it's Parallels Workstation (rather than Parallels Desktop, which is the version for OS X hosts).

Other than that, yes, try demos - and bear in mind that, for the non-free-as-in-beer version, switching from Windows to Linux as the host may mean buying another copy.

OP again, can ne1 help?

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW, which is one better, GNOME or KDE? My friend said it's whichever one I preferred, but I think he only said that because he doesn't really know, LoL. I mean, one of them has to be better, right?

I mean, really, what is this? Since Dice Holdings took over, does ./ now have to run weekly charity posts or something to improve its image and "accessibility"?

News for nerds, stuff that matters, and the velveteen touch of kindly old sysadmins. Watch as their eyes twinkle with delight at being able to help you solve why Outlook won't let you download that CuteKitties.VBS attachment some nice stranger sent you!

VMware Workstation

[PCM2]

For software test scenarios, I find VMware Workstation has just about everything you'd ever want. Its snapshotting feature is especially impressive, if you're diligent about it. Example: You install Windows, clean from the disc, that's a snapshot. Then you run Windows Update a zillion times to get everything up to date, that's a snapshot. Then say it asks you if you want to upgrade from Internet Explorer 7 to Internet Explorer 8. You do; that's a snapshot. Now you can flip back and forth between the two states of the VM; now you have IE7, now you have IE8. Now let's say you want to install something else in addition to the base Windows install. You can install it on both snapshots -- once on the IE7 state, and once on the IE8 state. Now the two VM states have diverged, and VMware forks them for you. You can then keep going, making new snapshots along each fork. And so on ... and you can actually navigate around your little branching tree of snapshots with a GUI, resetting the machine to the state you want, whenever you want. It's very useful. That said, it looks like the current list price is $250, so that might be out of range for someone who just wants it "for personal use."

Re:VMware is very easy but

[DaveAtFraud]

VMware tends to be fussy about the hardware. I had a non-descript Athlon dual core that ran VMware just fine but lacked horsepower and wa maxed out on RAM at 4GB. I decided to buy a 6 core Athlon, new motherboard and 16 GB of RAM. VMware installed just fine but the clock drifted all over the place (several seconds per minute). Finally gave up on VMware and went Xen. Xen worked just fine but lacked all of the nice management tools and virtual networking stuff that VMware had. SIGH.

Also, it will only install if you have a supported network card in your target box. Check the hardware requirements.

If you want to try VMware, there is a free version: http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/overview.html

Oh yeah, one other downside of VMware is the management console only runs on Windoze (at least when I was using it about a year or so ago). You will still need a separate, standalone Windows box

Cheers,
Dave

It used to be hard

[dbIII]

Now it isn't.
All of the above work well and stuff like virtualbox is a free download away.
In some cases I've migrated live systems to virtual with nothing more than clonezilla and virtualbox on what must have been close to the default settings.

!openstack

[Anonymous Coward]

stay away - this is an overzealous project, attempting to lasso in too many continuous moving parts. The ambition is great, but in today's market, I don't give a shit about learning some BS abstraction API layer. When the underlying vendor changes his/her design adds features etc, I don't want to wait for the feature, I want it now.

Open standards are great, but seriously things have gotten to the point of ridiculousness with everyone and their momma trying to enforce their own form of open. I will hands down choose Amazon over Crapspace any day

KVM, VirtualBox, depends

[caseih]

If you want to do virtualization of servers (most likely headless), then KVM is going to work great. The VMs on these machines you'll likely work with remotely. There are desktop clients for KVM or Xen, such as virt-manager or gnome-boxes, but I find video drivers, particularly in Windows are slow and lack OpenGL or DirectX support. virt-manager is nice for managing a cluster of KVM or Xen machines. You can use one instance of virt-manager to connect to any number of hosts and manage them or view their consoles.

I have a local server for the house that runs KVM virtual machines. I've got several Linux vms for trying out things, and I have a Windows XP instance that I access using rdesktop over the network. I also have two xen-based virtual machines hosted by Linode in data centers.

Gnome Boxes is an attempt to make creating local KVM virtual machines as easy as VirtualBox or VMWare, if you do want to us KVM for desktop virtualization.

For local desktop virtualization, VirtualBox or VMware are still your main options (Parallels being a non-free option). You'll probably want to just start there. Desktop virtualization can do things like integrate a windows desktop in a VM with your linux desktop so you can go between windows and linux windows (never as slick as you think it's going to be, but it works).

lmgtfy

[johnsnails]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=best+vm+software i hope it does not break the interwebs by finding this /. story

Re:lmgtfy

[Anonymous Coward]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=best+vm+software
i hope it does not break the interwebs by finding this /. story

Gotta love how the top two articles are from 2010. :)

Virtualbox is my favorite for beginners and above

[trodofor]

My favorite is VirtualBox, especially for a beginner. Runs pretty quick overall, has decent options, and seems to support a lot of hardware with a fair amount of configuration options available, but not required. Another great feature is that it runs on Windows and Linux hosts with the same UI, so you won't have to make any transitions there. I've also seen a web UI if you need to run it in a headless environment. I haven't tried it yet, but you can check out at http://code.google.com/p/phpvirtualbox/ There's also some headless and cli features available, so you can script more things that way as well. We currently use a dedicated host machine with 4-6 VMs running at any time without any issues so far.

Free VMware ESXi

[Anonymous Coward]

Vmware ESXi is free and it is very easy and extremely reliable.

But it is a bare metal hypervisor, so it doesnt need Windows or Linux installed first.

Best option in my opinion.

Jim

Virtualization is pretty easy in practice...

[Burning1]

Virtualization is pretty easy in practice. Understanding the theory behind virtualization is what tends to separate the men from the boys. Management of larger virtualization infrastructures, storage, etc... Also tend to be pain points.

I've personally worked with KVM, Xen, and various VMWare products. My usually recommendation is to start with the free version of ESXi available for download from VMWare's website. Although ESXi alone lacks a few core features (you need Vsphere for live migrations, right-click cloning, DRS and a bunch of other things) it does introduce a lot of the core concepts in ways that are fairly easy to wrap your head around.

Understanding how to do the following things are a good start:
- Use over-commitment to make better use of available resources.
- Set reservations, resource pools, and shares to keep critical systems humming along when someone in the engineering department decides to write a fork bomb on a dev machine.
- Live re-size disks.
- Manage virtual switches & virtual networking.
- Optimize virtual guests to run under a hypervisor
- Learn about ballooning, swapping, page sharing, etc.
- Learn how to monitor VMs, and debug disk/network/cpu/memory issues using command-line utilities, such as esxtop.

In general, ESXi is a great way to setup a virtual lab. I usually create a pair of virtual switches; one attached to my ethernet interface, one strictly external, and I route between them using a dual homed firewall distro, such as ZeroShell. This is a great environment for playing with DHCP, and other stuff that could break your home network.

For what it's worth, being a good Virtualization admin usually also means being a good storage admin. If you can get your hands on the netapp simulator, it's absolutely worth playing with.

Finally, knowing how to mess with ESXi does not make you a good Virtualization Admin. Read some books. Mastering Vsphere 5 by Scott Lowe is a good start. It covers everything you need to know about VMWare, and hits on storage and networking as well.

Finally, while ESXi is a great tool for corporate use and to learn virtualization theory, I strongly recommend gaining some experience with KVM. If you know what you're doing, KVM is much more powerful than the stand alone ESXi product. It's great for small businesses, or business that are banking on open source infrastructure, since it isn't artifically neutered the way standalone ESXi is, and doesn't have major licensing costs (unless you insist on RedHat Enterprise Virtualization.) If you need something with enterprise management capabilities and don't mind deploying bleeding edge code, the upstream project for RHEV is available on Fedora. Checkout the oVirt project - they are doing some very cool stuff.

Re:Virtualization is pretty easy in practice...

[BeanThere]

Set reservations, resource pools, and shares to keep critical systems humming along when someone in the engineering department decides to write a fork bomb on a dev machine

To be fair, critical systems shouldn't be running on dev machines to begin with, but yeah.

Virtual Box

[aembleton]

VMWare Player and VirtualBox are probably equally good for what you want.

The only real advantage of one over the other that I've found is that the free VMWare Player seems to pause traffic on the network connection every IIRC 2 minutes for about 5s. Not a huge problem but was something I noticed when trying to stress test some code. BTW, I was running Linux Mint as the client and Windows 7 as the host if that might have been the reason. When I tried on VirtualBox everything just worked without any trouble.

Why?

[ed1park]

Why do people here use VM's? Just for work? Just to test things?

Re:Why?

[jbeaupre]

I'll give you an example where it's helped me. I did a stint as a consultant. For one client, I had to use an encrypted laptop (file level. Even .txt files unreadable on non-encrypted systems). It sucked carrying two laptops everywhere.

So I installed XP in a virtual machine. 95% of the time I use the host OS. But when they email me something encrypted, I fire up the VM and read the Excel or Word file.

It's cumbersome, but less than carrying two laptops.

Re:Why?

[rrohbeck]

My main box runs Debian. For work I still need Outlook so I run XP in a VM.
Code needs to be compiled on/ported to/tested on CentOS 5/6, RHEL 5/6 and SuSE 10/11.
And some Java code like IPMI clients only runs correctly on 32-bit Java so I have a 32-bit Xubuntu install for that.

Randroid Alert

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I update your quote to someone that is less of a crazy sociopath?

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick

Ayn Rand is the person you quote when you only want other people who are off their meds to listen to you.

Re:Randroid Alert

[philip.paradis]

I'm probably wasting my time here as you're posting AC, and it's certainly offtopic, but I feel compelled to respond to this. What you've posted is a perfect example of rejecting a message you would otherwise hold in esteem because you have a personal problem with the core philosophy of the messenger, followed by substitution of a message with that is quite nearly functionally equivalent, yet represents the work of someone you happen to like more.

If anything, I would characterize your behavior as irrational, and thus amusingly at odds with both your reference to meds and the point of both quotes. The end result, at least to my perception, is apparent manifestation of quite an elitist attitude. Are you perchance employed in academia?

Re:VMware is very easy but

[danomac]

vSphere/ESXi is not the type of hypervisor he is seeking. It takes complete control over the hardware and it is picky on hardware, for an example it will not work with Realtek network cards. There is a HCL that you can refer to to get best results. I have built a whitebox ESXi hypervisor by replacing the network card on a desktop machine, and using a standard sata controller.

For what he's looking for, vmware-server or vmware-workstation is recommended as both run on top of an existing OS. I remember vmware-server being free, I'm not sure about vmware-workstation.

Re:VMware is very easy but

[fostware]

VCenter has an almost complete web interface that comes with version 5.x paid-for versions...
It's also installed on the VCenter VM Appliance.

It's resume buzzword collecting

[Fred Ferrigno]

OP will put it right next to "The Cloud" and "Web 2.0".

Horse before the cart...

[Andrewkov]

Learn how to use your physical machine first.

VirtualBox

[Anonymous Coward]

VirtualBox for newbies and VMWare for advanced users. If you're really into virtualization after using it for a while you should look into Proxmox VE--it's incredible.

Re:VMware is very easy but

[Anonymous Coward]

It will not work with SOME Realtek cards out of the box but there are many other cheap cards that it does work with like this one, I know because I have it.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833156139

vmware if you can affford it

[smylingsam]

In my experience, vmware trumps vbox in twos critical areas: backups and portability. you can take the directory with your vms and literally drop them into into another os with very little if any changes (the only changes may be to sound card name and shared folders paths).

You cant do that with vbox. If you change os, or try try to move vms without special and often long running and obscure seeming preparations and your vbox wont run ever again and often even if you succeed youll loose all the snapshots and still ahve to edit the vm before it's can be used.

  To me that ease of backup and portability is well worth the price of vmware if you can afford it. otherwise vbox is great but be prepared for an unreasonable amount of pain when you want to switch from windows to linux (and/or back), move the vms to another system / os and more pain on restoration then is reasonable.

see:
how it's really done in my experience : http://linuxfordummies.org/how-to-backup-and-move-virtualbox-machines/
How we all wish it would work but never seems to work for me: https://www.ehow.com/how_8110816_copy-move-virtualbox-machines.html

Google for wildly varying stories of vbox backup/restore pain.

Spring for VMware Workstation or Parallels...

[Omega996]

I have both VMware Workstation and Parallels, and they both work pretty well. I think VMware edges out Parallels, but if you get a deal on Parallels I wouldn't overlook it. They both run under Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X, and aren't *too* expensive.

Hyper-V Server

[Yourself]

I would suggest the free Hyper-V Server from Microsoft. If you really enjoy beating your head against the wall.

virtualbox

[DragonTHC]

it's free, has excellent features and will familiarize you with using VMs.

Z-machine or SWEET16

[mattack2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16

OH, you didn't mean THOSE kinds of virtual machines..

Re:Z-machine or SWEET16

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pitch black here. If you stay here, you might get eaten by a grue.

Re:Z-machine or SWEET16

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16

OH, you didn't mean THOSE kinds of virtual machines..

Thank you. Hilarious.
I do have a grey beard, but i still think you are older than me.......

VirtualBox works great for me

[Derwood5555]

Got a small system here that I use for learning.. I started out with VMware workstation 8 and 9. I've since tried Xen and VirtualBox. VirtualBox works great with CENTOS as the host OS. Very stable.

a couple different things

[Chirs]

1) I run linux but occasionally need windows-based software for desktop sharing or some corporate-level thing so I have a Win7 install in VMware for that
2) For emulating our product (which runs either 2.6.27 or 2.6.34 kernels) on my laptop (which runs 2.6.35 currently) I just fire up a KVM-based virtual machine.
3) I run Fedora but I'm looking at a media player where the build environment assumes Ubuntu...so just fire up Ubuntu in a VM.

VMware Player is fine

[Chirs]

Player is free, and works on windows/linux.

Re:VMware is very easy but

[DaveAtFraud]

Yeah. But you have to pay for it. If the OP just wants to experiment with different environments, I'd suggest he go with what he can try for free. VMware ESXi is free as in beer but at least the means no out of pocket for just trying it. I used an old Dell PIII (1.6GHz) running Windows XP Home to run the management console. About the worst thing about ths arrangement was that I only had network access to the Dell box so I was running VNC on it to provide a remote desktop (1 level of indirection) and then ran the various VMs (2nd level of indirection). Let's just say that the cursor didn't keep up with the mouse; not even close.

Cheers,
Dave

SmartOS

[tekxtc]

From SmartOS's wiki

"SmartOS is a hypervisor lean enough to run entirely in memory, powerful enough to run as much as you want to throw at it. Provisioning is blindingly fast, thanks to zones and ZFS file system creation."

More at http://wiki.smartos.org/

Re:VMware is very easy but

[DaveAtFraud]

I kind of missed that since the OP mentioned Xen (which takes over the host). You're probably right that he didn't know enough about various virtual environments to ask the right question.

I used VMware workstation for a while about 10 years ago (long story). It was definitely accecptable (even back then). Not sure what VMware has to offer in the way of free trials for workstation other than their pre-canned VM images. That's the only gotcha with that route.

Cheers,
Dave

Virtual Box to start, KVM to learn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtual Box is a great way to start. Load it up and it just runs. I use it often at my home to bring up whatever might be needed.

KVM though, is a great way to learn the finer details of running Virtual Machines. Start by using the command line and them move to something like virt-manager. Heck, run virt-manager on a virtual machine in the box you build.

VMware is a good product but not as good as KVM (imho). VMware has all sorts of wonderful tools that when you get the hang of using, makes things very easy but it has a tendancy to be difficult to work with if the hardware is not just perfect (recently had a box that swapped ip addresses between two nic cards - no easy cure). The documentation can be a bit difficult also.

I run KVM in a production environment have never had a hiccup.

I agree and here's why

[drinkypoo]

The D3D support in Virtualbox asplode every time I use it. It usually works in vmware.

Given a total lack of criteria, I will assume that they may want windows support, and so I'll suggest vmware every time.

If you only want to run Linux, virtualbox is probably fine.

If you choose vmware player, you should also install qemu so you can get access to its virtual disk management command. vmware player is missing such a tool (it is present in server) and qemu's is superior in any case.

Hyper-V Server Core 2012

[Anonymous Coward]

Try that one- because you should train the weakest like the strongest. Jump head first into this amazing free hypervisor that is akin to an empty swimming pool. Test out your skills with powershell and re-reading MSDN until your eyes bleed. I got it setup for my former boss who went on to destroy no less than three VMs in succession in less than 30 minutes. But on the really real best VM software for beginners is parallels on the best computer for beginners the Mac. My question is why would a beginner truly need a VM when the mouse itself is such a chore to operate? Two sets of cursors may blow apart the beginner mind so be forewarned.

VMWare Workstation

[Anonymous Coward]

VMWare workstation. that's the one I learned on about 12 years ago. The interface is much nicer than virtualbox. downside is it isn't free

Re:VMware is very easy but

[mlts]

ESX/ESXi are very picky. If I were going to run that, I'd build a machine and hand-picking all devices from the hardware list, even the NICs, and disabling the ones on the MB.

However, VMWare Workstation is not very persnickety. It doesn't require SLAT, and it works on a wide range of machines. Plus, you can move machines to and from your vSphere cluster.

On a Mac, I highly recommend VMWare Fusion. The price is a lot less than VMWare Workstation, and it does come into handy.

VMWare may be easy, but limited on platforms....

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're planning on using Windows or Linux for your base platform, then VMWare Player will suit you nicely - it allows you to create and run VMs just fine.
VirtualBox allows those platforms, plus quite a few more, including my favorite, Solaris x86/x64. Beats using Linux for a desktop for my needs, ymmv.

There are quite a few others of course, there's one based on the OpenSolaris fork IllumOS called SmartOS being developed by Joyent, who works with Nexenta giving back kernel/driver/software updates as developed, making both sides better for everyone. Gives things like ZFS, Dtrace and the Solaris Kernel with KVM and Containers - a very smart and easy to use platform, much like VMWare ESXi, except even more capable.

Don't settle on just one, give several a whirl, see what you like and dislike about each, one will surely be to your liking, and do what you want it to do.

Love VMWare, but...

[GodfatherofSoul]

Hardware compatibility issues are a major bitch. If you're a noob working with 2nd-hand hardware, you're even more likely to run into problems. I was all fired up this summer to turn my old Dell XPS 720 into a VMWare host and I ran into all kinds of problems with RAID setup due to lack of support. Sure, there *might* be a fix, but scouring forums and manuals when all you want to do is set up a web server is a major deterrent. I ended up not getting any of my summer projects done because of all the hurdles.

Now, if you've got a supported box, VMWare is great and I definitely recommend the infrastructure client.

I use VMware ESX (free version)

[Anonymous Coward]

If your hardware is on the supported hardware compatibility list [ www.vmware.com/go/hcl ] I think it is a good choice for a couple reasons: it is "enterprise" level software, so you get a working knowledge of what you might see at a job, the overhead is significantly less than running guest OS's in Windows (ESX runs on a thin version of Linux), and finally, you don't have to worry about any of the administration tasks of the host OS. The only downside is that you can't run the management software on the same hardware - gotta have two computers (ESX - the server and a Windows host to be the workstation).

I have an older Intel Q6600 Quad core with 8gb ram and a 500gb data drive (all "junk") running Two Win 7 desktops, 3 ipcop instances, and 4 Ubuntu server instances. Pretty decent for something that took less than half a day to get running.

qemu

[technosaurus]

For ease of use and the ability to actually read and understand the underlying source code, qemu is hard to beat, as most of Fabrice Bellard's projects are.

Another vote for VirtualBox ... maybe VMWare

[epp_b]

I used to like VMWare, but then they binned the console and forced that gaudy and cumbersome web UI upon everyone. v1.x is still good, but it requires some security adjustments for Vista or newer. It's also a pain to install on Linux.

On that basis, I'd recommend VirtualBox. It's open source, painless to install anywhere (often available in Linux package repositories) and just as good as VMWare, if not better in some ways. It also includes a slick "seamless" mode that integrates the guest OS windows into the host desktop (a la Parallels).

I'll bite....

[BLKMGK]

I've been using VMware at work for quickie testing. Seems to work well for this and the licensed copy allows snapshots which are very nice. I understand from developers doing work for us that they run into issues with VMware workstation when they script things to happen with the VMs. VMware player works okay for home use as Workstation is a bit pricey.

Virtual box, for me at home and some at work, works great! I don't know anyone exercising the API so I can't comment on that but for home use this rocks and is free!

Above that comes ESX which is also free with advanced functions disabled. This isn't something you run on a desktop but I've recently set it up to consolidate multiple other servers and this works terrific for a 24x7 system doing many mundane things like storage. This gives you experience with VT-d and all sorts of other goodies like figuring out how to do graceful shutdowns from a UPS signal etc. Fun stuff for sure and a good system to "graduate" to in my experience.

Not played with Xen, sorry....

Re:I'll bite....

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using VMware at work for quickie testing. Seems to work well for this and the licensed copy allows snapshots which are very nice. I understand from developers doing work for us that they run into issues with VMware workstation when they script things to happen with the VMs. VMware player works okay for home use as Workstation is a bit pricey.

Virtual box, for me at home and some at work, works great! I don't know anyone exercising the API so I can't comment on that but for home use this rocks and is free!

Above that comes ESX which is also free with advanced functions disabled. This isn't something you run on a desktop but I've recently set it up to consolidate multiple other servers and this works terrific for a 24x7 system doing many mundane things like storage. This gives you experience with VT-d and all sorts of other goodies like figuring out how to do graceful shutdowns from a UPS signal etc. Fun stuff for sure and a good system to "graduate" to in my experience.

Not played with Xen, sorry....

Thank you.

Xen

[Anonymous Coward]

I recommend Xen, because it's a bare metal hypervisor and it starts with an X (how cool is that?).

Hyper-V and KVM

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are two answers.

They are the most native to each major OS available. Apple doesn't really play in that space, but there are versions of VMware for MacOS X, Parallels (more or less for gaming on Mac OS X) and I think Darwin could support QEMU to some extent. Vbox runs on anything I believe.. unless OSX just went through a Service Pack update (Apple calls them releases) in which case the vm platforms will be along in a fortnight.

But you should be thinking more independent than that and focusing on [a] Backups [b] antivirus/malware [c] Patch management.

A virtual machine is just another form of physical machine, with the added disadvantage that you must also manage a hypervisor (which also needs the three things above).

The really nice thing about VM is that it frees you from hardware dependence when [a] recovering [b] testing backups [c] performing an emergency restoration of service. Most restores rely on the ability of the hypervisor to "mount" the storage container and extract instance in time files and data from a volume that went south and was not consistent, VHD, IMG, VMDK, TIB, ISO are examples. Testing a backup ranges from booting a virtual machine from the backups themselves with deferred writes to separate write update files blended with read-only backup volumes to fully making applications available to test the data. Performing an emergency recovery is when you can't afford a long outage and must be backup in some sembalance of go forward service at a reduced capacity.. with the ability to failback from P2V to V2P from your backing stores.

Today I can only think of 4 or 5 virtual platform and backup strategies that offer all of the above.. and the plain "vm" platforms like VMware, Vbox, Hyper-V and KVM (or Xen) don't represent the whole picture.. they are are naked as a bootloader on a PXE server.. their is not real met on the bones.. no complete thought that brings a project full circle.

Newer vm technologies roughly branch from jvm, davlik, or ios type "mini-vm" cores and blur the line between vm and virtualizing a library into a threads machine. It's funny how we';; work really hard to avoid learning how something works.. but making the programming that much harder.. just to claim its easy avoiding the heavy weight of a full virtual machine.. and then what do we do? we run the whole multithreaded javascript virtual machine, in a virtual machine on a virtual machine application development platform, inside of an operating system virtual machine on a virtualizating hypervisor on a virtual core, hyper threaded, multi-core CPU. Running Vanderpool or Pacifica.. oh the irony.. lol

Of course Windows has VHD virtual volumes now and Linux has LVM, if you prethink this out you could "kind of" derrive your own "VSS" like Virtual Machine Snapshot backup system at the block level.. but doing it yourself these days.. isn't cool.. the brain capital doesn't out weight the deterministic factor in Project Management. Certainty and reproducibility trumps development time even by SysAdmins.

Re:Hyper-V and KVM

[Anonymous Coward]

Same Anonymous Coward here..

Expanding on this a little bit.. its old school now but with Amazon Elastic Computing and all the other Continental "rent-a-compute" companies in play, even the Microsoft Azure initiative.

You might be dwelling a bit too much on the agrarian farm tractor. Re-inventing the wheel while Airplanes are flying overhead is a little outdated.

Currently the growth industry is in your own backyard, its in Apps, little things that solve problems and connect together like Lego blocks. The problem is glue we're using. Apple came out with the Mobile iOS (or Scott Forstall did according to some Homer Epics) which lead millions of geeks who's rather take their iPhone apart than play games on it to write games for it. They're just now trying to grow up and get a job in IT.. but no Jobs (to lead them).. so the Apple AppStore invented a new pastime and a frustrating game (called getting approved, no fart apps allowed et.al.) to deploy apps while they're waiting. Amazon and Google followed suit (literally) and now Microsoft is playing the (Me too.. Developers developers developers.. we said it First!) Which if you think about it is the cheapest way to outsource your development cost globally and reduce your capital risk.. but invoking all this collective effort with Zero start up costs. Well.. Microsoft is trying to buy a seat at the table.. and maybe they are watching too many Kevin Costner movies late night on NetFlix.. but I degress.

The glue they are using are the rules of engagement. Apple went Objective-C, Google kinda went all over the place, Amazon is mulling it over. And the legal system is wrangling the question on the right to Patent and API (literally it may still be up for grabs). At some point the Patent system will force programmers and hosting centers off the planet, or sequester running code on private servers with Soverign rights so the Courts cannot inspect them.. then they'll have to invoke some "magic" method or call it "fair use" or risk being Sanctions by the International Patent Court of planet Earth... for crimes against humanity. Then the only safe place will be to outsource the coding requirements to microbes on Mars.

Re:VMware is very easy but

[BLKMGK]

Or run a Windows VM and VNC to it to run Vsphere....

Would be nice to know if the OP wants a desktop or server sized solution to play with. If just desktop there's plenty of options....

Re:VMware is very easy but

[BLKMGK]

They have VMplayer and now it allows you to create new VMs not just use appliances without jumping through hoops. It works well but no snapshots I don't think, you can obviously copy a VM manually. Workstation is good though if working with ESX as I swear you need an array of tools to get stuff to convert on it. Yeah I know about the standalone converter...

Re:What the fuck, don't read how to ride a bike!

[girlinatrainingbra]

Don't read a book on how to ride a bike! You've got to ride a bike to learn how to ride a bike!

;>p

Some people learn just by reading. Others learn even better and get deeper comprehension by learning about the derivation or how the system was developed. This is where history of science becomes useful. This is where people who want to build up their own box with Linux frm Scratch learn a hell of a lot more about what the intricate bits of the gnu and linux world are and how and where they interact and where the little config+rc files all can go.

You can learn linux distro sysadmin by reading a book or by running your own system and adminning it yourself: create new users, learn about restrictions, set up sshh, put in restrictions or quotas on disk usage, learn to put partitions different places to see what's disastrous and what isn't.

Sounds like the same with virtual machines: you can read all about it, or since there are so many opportunities to run some free/opensource versions (instances?) of virtual machines, why not actually build one, install an operating system from scratch, and see what the whistles and bells are in it?

Different people learn different ways. No-one learns to ride a bike by reading about it. No-one learns to swim just by reading about it. Some activities are easier learned by doing.

Re:VMware is very easy but

[BLKMGK]

Its not THAT picky if you do research. I've got a dirt cheap 1150? Board with an i7 on it that worked great including VT-d except I chose a 2600k back before folks realized it has VT-d disabled - grr! Oh, onboard NIC worked fine. Model number not handy but if anyone cares I can find it.

I have a Tyan Xeon board too. 3 NICS with one being iPMI/iKVM. Not super cheap but maxxed out what ESXi can run. Single socket 32gig ECC. This is what I graduated to :-)

My thoughts

[Brad1138]

Virtual box is nice and easy and a great emulator for beginners. VMware player (free) does a MUCH better job with 3D video, but is a little harder to use. Also, my video rating with VB running Win 7 w/Ubuntu host is 2.3 w/VMware it is 5.5, A very significant difference. One thing I have noticed though is VMware uses more memory in host (Ubuntu) than VB.

Re:VMware is very easy but

[LordLimecat]

VMWare Workstation 9 also has a web interface, though I havent had a chance to really mess with it. Its also substantially less expensive :)

Recommendation to OP: If you decide to pony up for VMWare workstation, you may be able to get an academic discount if you are in school. They make it pretty painless to order online.

VirtualBox is easy to use

[kokoko1]

These days I am using Vmware workstation (my company had a license) before that i use VB mostly. However for server side i will recommend KVM (Kernel Base Virtual Machine). In my previous jobs I used User Mode Linux and then Xen and ended with KVM, see you upgrade with the way Linux progress :)

Punch in the face.

[Alex Belits]

I recommend punch in the face.
As if we need more VMWare jockeys who use VMs as a way of running Linux on Windows, and "maintaining" it as if it's a Windows VM.

Re:VMware is very easy but

[Anonymous Coward]

"VMware installed just fine but the clock drifted all over the place (several seconds per minute). "

Was it the clock of the host or the clock on your VMs that drifted ?
I've got a similar problem on my Linux VM's and fixed it by setting a minimum cpu freq. to 50

Re:VMware is very easy but

[The-Forge]

There are a few docs in the VMware knowledge base about clock drift on AMD CPUs. 90% of the issues are solved by turning off "Quiet'n'Cool" or any other power saving feature in the BIOS that alters the clock speed. The same advice goes for Intel chips with SpeedStep. The clock fluctuation really screw with the VM's VCPU emulation. I turned it off and my drift dropped to a minute or so a week which is easily fixable with a NTP service on Linux.

VB or VMW or KVM

[kubusja]

Private use for beginner:

VirtualBox - simple and juz works - only remember about host and guest extensions

Company use where you have ample funds for support:

VMware

Company use on a shoestring:

KVM

Which VMware? They have 6 VM programs!

[Anonymous Coward]

Which VMware? They have 6 VM programs!

Everyone saying to use "vmware" appears to be clueless. VMware makes 6+ virtual machine programs.
* Workstation
* fusion
* Player
* Server
* ESX
* ESXi

When you say "vmware", you are not being clear.

Desktop virtualization is very different from server virtualization. There are very different requirements. If you are starting out, then you probably want desktop virtualization. Nothing beats Workstation. Nothing, but it has a price. OTOH, it works and has some awesome features that none of the other option provide.

If you want free and "good enough", then VirtualBox or Player are probably the best options for desktop virtualization. None of these are suitable for server virtualization. I've used ESX, ESXi, Xen, KVM, LXC, UML, and even tried to use virtualbox for server virtualization - these days I'm migrating all the VMs to KVM. KVM has fantastic backing that will be hard for the other guys to beat AND it is free. I've never had a KVM VM crash - NEVER. Xen VMs are pretty stable, but after kernel updates I've had VMs refuse to boot. ESX and ESXi is commercial and VMware has been screwing their customers with license cost changes. They've gotten greedy. Last June, we shutdown our last ESX and ESXi VM hosts. We never intend to turn those on again. NEVER.

VIrtualbox is good enough.

[Rexdude]

I run Windows 8 and I've tried both the built in support for VMs by running an XP virtual machine, and Virtualbox. I prefer the latter, I use it now to run Linux Mint, and also successfully tested Haiku alpha 3.

Hyper-V on Windows 8.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hyper-V on Windows 8.

Pick the one with the best website. ... No joke.

[Qbertino]

Seriously, AFAICT, there are many FOSS VM solutions out there by now. And from what I've heard, none of them are extremely difficult to set up or run. They just follow different obvious or more hidden concepts and strategies, and thus may be suited better for certain setups. But as I say, a good FOSS project will have a good website, either by dedicated people who respect their webdesigners (allways a good sign of a professional non-elitist crew) or build by a dedicated company that puts money into the project.

Enter FOSS VM into Google, broadly scan the websites and take the one that 'looks' best and take it from there. If you run into requirements or usage scenarios that don't fit the one you then know you want to cover, switch.

Good luck.

stay away...

[Anonymous Coward]

From Citrix's Xenserver... or be prepared that someday, after some updates, your hardware could get out of their HCL...

The first update of xenserver 5.6 left me with a cluster freezing with no apparent reason... reverting to the unupdated 5.6 let me survive... But with PV you must keep the DOM0 updated...

Switched to Vmware, almost happy since then...

If you have time, have a look at some open source solutions... When evaluating other solutions, I found Proxmox (based on KVM and OpenVZ) promising, though not yet ready for my needs...

http://pve.proxmox.com

Start simple

[ripvlan]

I've used many. I started with MS Virtual Server 2005 because it could create shared storage, which I needed to experiment with MS Clustering. Our corp IT infrastructure is VMware ESX/vSphere/vCloud, and now I use VMware Desktop for my local stuff. But on my office machine money isn't a concern, I have the "Ultimate" MSDN license.

At home, where money does matter, I use VirtualBox. I find it very easy to use, great UI, and has all of the features one needs. It has a virtual network - but I haven't used it yet. I use virtual networking in VMware to simulate different LAN configs, mostly to play around...I'm a software Dev...not IT.

My recommendation... Start with VirtualBox and learn the concepts. It is easy to setup, has all of the features you probably need, and has reasonable documentation. It also seems to be compatible with both the outside equipment/OS, and hosts everything inside that I've ever tried (including Win8). I think you'll spend less time farting around with silly stuff and be able to have success quickly.

Then if you want to try a bare metal config, I suggest looking at VMware ESX...it is free for a single machine, and its the real deal. It is well documented, both by VMware and the fanboy clubs ;-). It is complex, so there is a lot of doc to read and get started. And as others have pointed out, it has hardware requirements.

You can be reading up while enjoying VirtualBox.

Also, I suggest learning about iSCSI. There may be times that you need shared storage. I keep a vm running Windows 2008 as my storage machine. It is simple. Remember, I'm just experimenting with different things, so quick and easy is what I'm looking for. In real life we have a NetApp.

Have fun.

Depends on usage

[Andtalath]

First of all, if you want a simple solution that just works for very simple virtualization, vmware player works fine (free for personal use, not good for professional use)
Next step is virtualbox, lacks a bit of polish but has many really nice features (Open Source Software).
Next step is WMware Workstation, has most of the advantages of virtualbox (and some other nice ones), still very much a desktop application, costs some money, probably about the same as office (can't remember).
Next step is ESXi, that is, a good, reliable hypervisor, this is ACTUAL virtualization, however, this is for headless operations only (so this requies a dedicated machine).
Next step would be Microsoft Hyper-V, basically, you get a host windows OS which can host other machines and, even if it crashes, the guest OSes are still there, it works decently but is expensive.
vSphere, this is basically the same as ESXi but with more functionality, especially good cluster functions.

Xen and KVM are awesome as well, but something tells me you are not the "Learn it the hard way" type, so I don't recommend them.

The nomenclature hype

[Anonymous Coward]

Hypervisors are really just specialized and optimized proprietary Linux kernel distros. They are as bare metal as running a VM/KVM on GNU/Linux, but without all the GNU tools, and with special tools for the VMs.

VMWare Player easy to start with and up-compat

[clay_shooter]

VMWare Player is great and runs on both hosts you mentioned. VMs created with it can be used on all VMware products if you decide to get more sophisticated later. It also lets you migrate to VMWare Fusion on a MAC if that becomes your host of choice.

Which camera

[Frankie70]

Dedicate a day or so to each one with the goal of having a fully working linux vm and a fully working windows vm at the end of the day.

There are so many different linuxes & so many different windows. Which one should I try go get working at the end of each day?

Take lots of pictures.

I don't have a camera at present. I am planning to buy one - there are lots in the market. Which one should I buy?

KVM seems easy

[Anonymous Coward]

I usually use VirtualBox, but experimented with KVM on my Linux box and KVM seemed easy enough. The difference between beginner and pro is creating and cloning images - you can do that in VB, but the other stuff like KVM, VMWare, etc is designed for pros who are doing creating+cloning from the command line with scripts. Casual users won't get that far - they just want to boot the latest Windows in a virtual machine for testing.

What for?

[homesteader]

There are 2 primary reasons to be thinking about virtualization: 1. To experiment with multiple OS, or use multiple OS and not need multiple desktops. 2. To learn about virtualization as it applies to systems management/administration.

If you are looking for tools to save you from building multiple desktops, start with VirtualBox. It's free and decent. VMWare workstation is still the industry standard, they've been doing this since 1999.

If you are looking for tools to learn about how modern server environments are operated, then go get VMWare ESXi, install BSD and play with jails, or whatever strikes your fancy. For SMB's, it's about VMWare ESXi and MS HyperV(for the poor). The hard thing about learning about virtualization is that without virtualized storage(iscsi/fc SAN) you are only getting part of the picture. If vmotion had to copy all of a system's data every time you needed to do maintenance on a server, it wouldn't be so impressive. So build out a freenas server with a few hundred gigs of drive space and iscsi configured, and then pick a hypervisor to play with!

All of the above... sort of

[Thumper_SVX]

I've used a fair smattering of virtual hosts and hypervisors both at work and personally. So here's what I think of them all (the free ones, anyway);

VMware: Probably one of the easiest to get set up and master. Dead simple point-and-click interface. Learning this is good if you want a career in virtualization because it is the yardstick by which all others are judged. There are a lot of features though that are disabled in the free version that are used in corporate environments... but you'll have the basics down.

Hyper-V: Also very simple to use and manage... but unlike VMware means you can run it as a side-piece on your existing Windows box rather than having a dedicated piece of hardware just for virtualization. Already built into most modern Windows variants, and used somewhat regularly in corporate environments. Again, paid adds features and support.

Citrix XenServer: Takes the basics of the open source Xen and adds a pretty damned nice GUI. Paid version adds support, but most of the major features are available and functional in the freebie. Trial versions of everything are available. Memory management out of the box is a bit of a pain (no overcommitment by default) but easy enough to modify. Use in corporate environments tends to follow people who have significant Citrix/XenDesktop infrastructure.

Xen (Open Source): By far the best to learn EVERYTHING about how virtualization actually works, but probably the worst for actually getting running VM's. There are GUI tools to simplify it, but since Xen is currently moving to a new toolset that is incompatible with most GUI interfaces, and the GUIs tend to be a smidge buggy on occasion it's usually easier just to learn the command line. Of course, then there are config files, XML files, bridged network interfaces. If you want to learn about the internals this is the way to go... but if you're only going to dedicate a day to trying each one then you might want to skip it... this one will take a couple of days at least even with the several well-written HOWTO's. Having said that, once everything is working it's really nice and you can turn around and say that you know how virtualization works, instead of just saying you know how a single product works!

VirtualBox: Like VMware is good for the beginner to learn the basics because it does have a nice GUI that guides you through everything. Update notifications are a constant irritant though; it seems that every week they're releasing an update for this bug or another... I turn that off and upgrade when I feel like it! However, use in corporate environments is almost non-existent. Good support for most OS's, and decent support for 3D graphics and the like but still pretty kludgy. I use it on my Mac for running my BootCamp partition while under OSX... mostly so I can access stuff on that installation and run updates and the like without having to reboot OSX.

I broke out the two main versions of Xen because they are significantly different. They are similar at the core (based on the same code) but Citrix has it own front-end tools that are incompatible with the tools you'll use under open source. However, the commands are the same and so learning open source Xen will have some bearing on using Citrix Xen.

Of course, there are plenty of other hypervisors out there. My personal recommendation if you just want to play would probably be Hyper-V or VirtualBox. VirtualBox has the advantage of being cross-platform; I don't know if you run Linux or Windows (or OSX) at home, and obviously Hyper-V is Windows only. If you really want to learn virtualization and how it works, then open source Xen is the way to go... I run it on my Ubuntu 12.04LTS box and love it... but it's not for the faint of heart! Setting up the networking alone can be "fun" and you should definitely familiarize yourself intimately with how to undo what you have done so you don't break anything! VMware like I said is used extensively in corporate environments... so if you want to pursue it as a career I'd recommend dedicating a box to an ESXi server and just play with it. It's free and easy... but really doesn't teach much in my opinion.

Virtual Box

[Anonymous Coward]

For a beginner I would say Virtual Box. It is open sourced - GPL version 2 compliant licensing. The hypervisor is software based - so runs as an app on your existing machine; this also means you have the flexibility of turning it off - and regaining full resources for your host operating system if/when you need it (e.g. if you play high performance video games or other processing/ram intensive activities).

It allows you to manage most of the functionality of a normal virtual environment including virtual network connections, allocation of resources to VMs and so on. It supports a large number of guest OSs to varying degrees of fidelity.

Finally - I found it to be easy to install and use compared to other virtual environments.

After you've played with Virtual Box for some time and want to do something more serious on the server side - I would advise using AMD processor based systems with lots of RAM and harddrive space [or network attached storage], and upgrading to bare metal hypervisors such as KVM or VMWare.

vmware or vbox and lots of ram on the host

[Anonymous Coward]

both need lots of ram and fast cpu on host. I use vmware and with 8g on host I can give 4g to windows 7. it works ok but I think16g on host would be better. also you'll want a 3ghz cpu or faster and ideally dual core or more cores. the more power the better. lastly ssd makes io faster on host as well as client.

Too late

[Chompjil]

Welp, time to move to Xfce, oh wait, already done

Might help

[Anonymous Coward]

It might help us if you told us what your host OS is, you paki bastard.

Hyper-V on Win8 (seriously)

[GLH-DEV]

If you want to work with Virtual Machines on one loaded up desktop computer, Hyper-V on Windows 8 is a excellent solution. Be sure to get 2 NICs and follow best practices about only binding one to a virtual switch. On my desktop box I am able to run 4-5 VMs and still play Skyrim effectively. I've run Xen on the same box, and Hyper-V under server 2008r2. The Windows 8 implementation of Hyper-V is reliable and easy to use and leaves you a high performance desktop as an added bonus.

Virtualbox

[h8sg8s]

Oracle's Virtualbox is the only VM that directly supports Mac hosts, if that's a factor. It's also free and very stable. Sun did a great job on it and so far Oracle's not screwed that up.

VirtualBox is a good place to start.

[collinc]

I'd definitely stick to VirtualBox or VMware if you're going to be running your VM's on a Windows PC. If you're looking to try the complete VM experience for a work environment then try in the 'bare metal' category. We use Citrix XenServer which is pretty nice and has a free license that can be perpetually renewed. Only downside (if you consider this a downside) is that you can't over commit the server resources without purchasing some spendy upgrades. For something like that (ie you wanna resell server space through VM's) you'd want a Xen or KVM setup and run something like SolusVM to administer your host machine. At home on my Windows PC I stick with VirtualBox. It doesn't have a lot of advanced features, but it can install from ISO images and runs rather well for standard operating systems like Windows and Linux. I had a harder time getting some of the pre-made VHD's to boot properly with it. So if you stick with like a debian network install cd you'd be good. /ramble

Virtual Machine Guests Sharing Disks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there any easy way to have a bunch of virtual machines sharing disks? Anywhere I'm using VMware, I typically have a bunch of guests that all want to run a relatively current Linux, and I'd really prefer to have them all running off the same set of packages, so I can do my updates once instead of downloading the same fixes N times and using N times the storage. I realize it's possible to use NFS or Samba with one guest acting as a file server for the others, but it seems really inelegant.

The environments I've used have been VMware Player and ESXi, but I'd be interested in knowing if KVM and Xen have good support for that also.

Re:VMware is very easy but

[Anonymous Coward]

Clock drift is not a problem per se, it's a property of virtualizing hardware. You are lying about the time that's passing by simulating cycles given that most timekeeping techniques assume a fixed CPU or interrupt frequency. Virtualization simply invalidates this assumption.

However, I think it's a a poor basis for comparing virtualization products.

KVM can do timer interrupt injection/replay to try to synchronize the host and guest's perception of time, but it is like tracking a moving target that wobbles based on competing loads. Most virtualization products that try to eliminated clock drift simply do it with a built-in/short-circuited timeserver (VirtualBox, VMWare, ... via their "additions"), however you can do this yourself trivially. If you reach a point where your synchronizations can't keep the clock accurate enough for your particular application (ex, Kerberso, Active Directory, whatever) then you have a load issue and need to invest in better hardware. Virtualization alone can't solve those kinds of problems.

I don't personally prefer VMWare, but if you were otherwise happy you could have installed an NTP server on the host and a client in the guest and gone home early.

Hyper-V is in fact free-as-in-beer

[daboochmeister]

Just to get the info out there, because I see so many erroneous postings here concerning it ... there's a bare-metal Type 1 hypervisor version of Hyper-V, Hyper-V Server 2012, that is free, no charge. For the OP, a type 1 hypervisor is one that you install on the machine as the "base" OS ... then you run VMs for Linux, Windows, etc. within that hypervisor. That's opposed to Type 2 hypervisors, that run as a software package with in full OS that you have installed - like running VirtualBox inside Windows or Linux.

So now, having said that there is a free type 1 version of Hyper-V ... I have to caveat it by pointing out that, like you might expect with Microsoft, it's basically a gateway drug to their other products, in that to administer it effectively and use it in most real-world use cases, you need to have e.g. Windows Server 2012 installed somewhere, etc.

Dual Homed Hosts (VirtualBox +1)

[wirefall]

I could never get any of the free versions of VMWare to work properly with my dual-homed test machine (I have eth0 connected to the Internet and eth1 connected to my lab). I wanted to run security testing VMs,like BackTrack against my lab network. VirtualBox had no problem assigning either of the network adapters. I use it almost exclusively now.

Re:VMware is very easy but

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a few docs in the VMware knowledge base about clock drift on AMD CPUs. 90% of the issues are solved by turning off "Quiet'n'Cool" or any other power saving feature in the BIOS that alters the clock speed. The same advice goes for Intel chips with SpeedStep. The clock fluctuation really screw with the VM's VCPU emulation. I turned it off and my drift dropped to a minute or so a week which is easily fixable with a NTP service on Linux.

Thank you. That info will be very usefull.

Re:VMware is very easy but

[Anonymous Coward]

Or run a Windows VM and VNC to it to run Vsphere....

Would be nice to know if the OP wants a desktop or server sized solution to play with. If just desktop there's plenty of options....

Thank you.
Desktop only.

Re:VMware is very easy but

[Anonymous Coward]

I kind of missed that since the OP mentioned Xen (which takes over the host). You're probably right that he didn't know enough about various virtual environments to ask the right question.

I used VMware workstation for a while about 10 years ago (long story). It was definitely accecptable (even back then). Not sure what VMware has to offer in the way of free trials for workstation other than their pre-canned VM images. That's the only gotcha with that route.

Cheers,
Dave

Yes, exactly, thank you.
I am in the information collecting stage now.

VM ware

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtual Box worked well for me. In fact it's probably the VM ware for dummies. I didn't know anything about VM ware when I installed it. Just followed the instruction by locating the CD drive or ISO file of the installer and that was all after following a few more easy instructions.

VMware

[Vrtigo1]

It depends on what you want to do with it. VMware has the advantage of working well, being easy to learn, and arguably being the industry standard for virtualization software. KVM is more popular if you are on the *nix side of things, and I believe has the added advantage of being free, but if you look at software vendors providing virtual appliances, 95% of what they will give you is a VMware image, so to me that tells me VMware is the way to go.