[clug] What do people use for Virtualisation at home?

[Scott Ferguson]

On 02/04/13 15:06, steve jenkin wrote:
> I'm guessing a good number of you run VM systems on your home Linux,
> would you care to comment on what works and what doesn't??
> 
> Or just talk about "Why I use what I use".
> 
> I know about:
>  - KVM/qemu [well integrated into RedHat, not sure about Fedora, would
> guess so]
>  - XEN [used to need special kernel and non-standard boot]
>  - Vmware: licensed workstation, free player, free entry-level Server.
> Tridge uses this, IIRC.
>  - Oracle/SUN Virtual Box. Free, full source. keeps getting better
>  - Hyper-V... Sorta free is you embrace
>  - Parallels. They do a LNX container, as source. Not sure about LNX
> versions.
>  - WINE, Codeweavers 'CrossOver'
>  - various 'containers'.
>  - lguest from 'our own' Rusty...
> 
> There are Solaris variants of VM's and Containers as well. I presume
> available on OpenSolaris.
> 
> I'm wondering what I'll try with Debian Stable on a new PC.
> Not looking for 'blazing performance' , but solid, reliable and easy to
> use/manage. Don't care about Graphics performance, won't be doing
> intensive GUI work.
> 
> Thanks in Advance,
> steve
> 

Crossover - Office 2000 and 2007 (I prefer OOo and LO, but it's good to
check compatibility), Adobe Acrobat 8, Foxit PDF Editor, Picasa, Dragon
Naturally Speaking 10, IE 8

WINE/PlayOnLinux - Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird

VirtualBox non-free - for lots and lots of things, especially where I
want a virtual representation of a physical instance. VirtualBox
machines do transfer easily from one host to another*1 - though
sometimes I've had to fiddle a little with machines that use RAW disks
(i.e. USB Flash drives).  I've recently moved all my VirtualBox machines
from a local instance to a headless server and in most cases it was an
easy transition. It is possible to move a running VirtualBox machine but
I haven't tried it yet. It's also fairly simple to convert physical
machines to virtual machines - the reverse can be a little trickier.
In most instances I find vboxmanage (and vboxheadless) give me better
control than the VMWare equivalents - but to be fair I haven't really
used VMWare much in the last year, maybe it's improved. VirtualBox
support for Mac became verbotem after Oracle took over - I'd be
interested if VMWare supported it (VB does, but just not openly).

Kind regards

*1 Carlo may have run into version issues with extensions, and sometimes
you need to remove the imported drive/s from Virtual Media Manager, copy
them from the original and then add them with under Settings (UUID
problems). And yes, I do run Debian.