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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.
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.
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.
Virtualbox.
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 is the best for a beginner. User-friendly GUI, sane defaults, it Just Works.
Easy to set up (I walked my brother through it over the phone) easy to use (ditto) and fairly full featured.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
My first experience was setting up a BackTrack5 machine in VirtualBox. Extremely easy, and lots of information online if you have a question.
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.
+1.
Really? A discussion is not required for this
Why is parent modded at -1? Seriously, just look around and play with them wtf?
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.
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.
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.
How dare someone ask a software preference question on /. Doesn't he know this is a politics/religion website?
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.
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!
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.
Running on a Chrome-book of course...
This negative comment was necessary to counterbalance the huge number of positive comments that are recommending VirtualBox. It's a yin-yang thing.
Better known as 318230.
That was awesome
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.
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.
Its free
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
Then decide.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
... 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.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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.
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.
It has to compete with Reddit.
Which Virtual Machine Software For a Beginner?
No.
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.
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
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.
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."
Breakfast served all day!
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
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
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.
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.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
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).
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.
... 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.
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
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=best+vm+software i hope it does not break the interwebs by finding this /. story
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.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
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.
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?
Don't be a dick he is interested in other peoples opinions, you could learn a lot from that guy.
Can someone read this guy's post to me, or at the very least, summarize it? It's too long!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why do people here use VM's? Just for work? Just to test things?
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.)
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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"
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.
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.
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.
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
OP will put it right next to "The Cloud" and "Web 2.0".
So, don't answer. Don't post anything.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
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.
Learn how to use your physical machine first.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
it's free, has excellent features and will familiarize you with using VMs.
They're using their grammar skills there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16
OH, you didn't mean THOSE kinds of virtual machines..
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
[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.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
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.
Player is free, and works on windows/linux.
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
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
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/
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
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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 swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
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...
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
RTFM
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?
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
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.
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).
VirtualBox.
'Nuff said.
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.
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?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
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.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
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....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
"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.
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...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
;>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.
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 :-)
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
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.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
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.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
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.
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 :)
http://askaralikhan.blogspot.com/
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.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
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.
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
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.
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.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
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.
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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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?
Write failed: Broken pipe
apt-get install kvm
qemu-img create hda.img 8G
kvm -cdrom sid.iso -hda hda.img -boot d
Watch this Heartland Institute video
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.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
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.
There are so many different linuxes & so many different windows. Which one should I try go get working at the end of each day?
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?
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!
tl;dr: People suck.
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.
Welp, time to move to Xfce, oh wait, already done
People once told me 68K ram was all we needed,
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.
I heard some were such dimbulbs that they forget to put units on quantities.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
Organization? You must be joking..
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".
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
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
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:
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.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
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?
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
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 =/
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
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!
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
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.
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.
... 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.
So now, having said that there is a free type 1 version of Hyper-V
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
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.
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.
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?
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
yes. completely correct. http://www.topsupraskytop.com/
Yep. On a side note, how do I determine the length of the longest side in a right angled triangle?
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
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.