Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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
(To the OP)
VMware is easy to use and is free, as in beer. One of its strengths is that virtual disks can be moved about and that makes it easy to create virtual appliances. There're a ton of them out there on the net, mostly Linux distros tailored for a specific use. I've fooled around a bit with VBox and it's OK. Its performance is not on the same level with VMware. Or you could try Zen. Or attach electrodes to your feet like they did to Ham.
For me, as a desktop Linux user, VMware has been the mac-daddy killer app. There's not much reason to boot to Windows these days except for games, and I've found that what won't run under wine will usually run in VMware with a Windblows guest. Also, there were some kernel taint problem associated with VirtualBox that've been probably fixed by now.
On the other hand, if you're planning on running OS/2 in your guest, then Vbox is the only way to go! I learned that a couple of months ago.