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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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
... 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.
It has to compete with Reddit.
Which Virtual Machine Software For a Beginner?
No.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
VirtualBox runs OS/2 as guest!!! that's a must for VM engine :)
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.
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?
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...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16
OH, you didn't mean THOSE kinds of virtual machines..
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.
[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.
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/
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.'"
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.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
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.
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
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
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.
apt-get install kvm
qemu-img create hda.img 8G
kvm -cdrom sid.iso -hda hda.img -boot d
Watch this Heartland Institute video
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.
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
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.
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.
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.