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

[Chris Smart]

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??
> 

I used to use VirtualBox but now I use KVM with virt-manager exclusively.

I find the power and flexibility that comes with the tool-suite second
to none. I can connect to local or remote hosts without any drama, all
over SSH, Kerberos, or certs (also policykit or simple user/group
permissions locally).

I get virtio device support (nic, ata, balloon) and pci-passthrough if I
want it. Supports qcow2, vdi, vmdk, raw images as well as LVM devices.
Multiple storage pools.

I can migrate live machines on the fly, including migration of storage
images (like vmotion I guess). Also works in clusters on GFS and CLVM
for failover if that's your thing. Can snapshot and restore machines
with qcow2 images. Memory ballooning, can hotplug CPUs, RAM, disks. I
can emulate most CPUs, from a 486 or Westmere, to arm, mips, sparc, ppc.
I can turn also on or off extensions like SSE, set the number of cores
and threads, even pinning.

I can have create isolated or forwarded networks (nat/route), vlans, bonds.

Oh, and SPICE[1].

I've found that kvm support is better on Fedora than Ubuntu, primarily
because they seem to run newer versions (and maybe because libvirt is
RedHat sponsored). I've run into errors using a newer version of
virt-manager on Fedora to create new machines on CentOS though because
the backend is older and doesn't support things I might want to use,
like SATA. Just have to watch that or use a tool on the host to create
machines.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPICE_%28protocol%29

-c