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View Poll Results: Which VT software do you prefer?
Parallels 0 0%
Virtualbox 13 37.14%
VMWare (various flavors) 16 45.71%
Qemu (various combos or not) 6 17.14%
Voters: 35. You may not vote on this poll

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Old 4th August 2008
prijikn prijikn is offline
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I think VMware is the one of the best virtualization software because It's free and It's compatible with all Linux
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Old 4th August 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by prijikn View Post
I think VMware is the one of the best virtualization software because It's free and It's compatible with all Linux
Free ... same free as nvidia binary blob, not a good thing really, maybe you will understand that some day.

Compatible with all Linux you say, all Linux systems use Linux kernel (SRSLY?) so what is strange here that it runs on all Linux systems?

WMware is crap because it is LIMITED to Linux (and windows, even worse).

You cannot run it on OpenSolaris or FreeBSD (dont even start about WMware3) or any other UNIX.
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Old 4th August 2008
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i haven't tried VirtualBox yet. how does it compare performace/feature-wise with VmwareWS6?
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Old 4th August 2008
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@ephemera

Its genrally as fast or even faster then WMware, very responsive, great for desktop usage, along with its seamless mode.
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Old 4th August 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ephemera View Post
i haven't tried VirtualBox yet. how does it compare performace/feature-wise with VmwareWS6?
Here's Ivan Voras's results after running FreeBSD in VirtualBox (on Windows XP), and what he thinks about VMWare Server 2.0.
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Last edited by s0xxx; 4th August 2008 at 03:50 PM. Reason: Minor typo
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Old 4th August 2008
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interesting, i didn't expect virtualbox to be in the same league as vmware in terms of performance.
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Old 4th August 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ephemera View Post
interesting, i didn't expect virtualbox to be in the same league as vmware in terms of performance.
I will have to benchamrk them (and many more) as part of my master's thesis, so I will put them here before 2009 begin.
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Old 4th August 2008
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There's a fellow on Fedora forums, who did some casual benchmarking of VBox vs. kvm.
He found that KVM was actually a bit ahead of native in raw computer and VBox a bit behind. (By raw computing, I've forgotten what he used to test, but some sort of number crunching, I think.) Using Native as 100, KVM (on a machine with a VT enabled processor) was something like .99 and VBox about 100.01 or so.

Phoenix and myself have expressed our opinions of 2.0 and they pretty much agreed with the link provided S0xxx. Judging from their forums, it seems that most people seem to agree that 2.0 is a regression.
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Old 4th August 2008
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Hello,

At work I am setting up a workstation for myself that will need virtualization. It will run Slackware 12.1 and will need to emulate Windows XP. The primary software that will be run will be MS Office and maybe some kind of vnc.

Any suggestions?
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Old 5th August 2008
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For a situation like that, I think VirtualBox will be your best choice. See my http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu/vmcomp.html

(Did I mention that page already in this thread? Well, it was probably on page one.)
The only argument against it would be if you need the XP machine to be a host on the LAN. However, setting up a bridged connection isn't overly difficult.
VMware-server (choose the current 1.6-whatever, not the beta 2.0) does the bridged networking out of the box but requires more resources in my opinion.
Lastly, one thing I do find is that any VM will gradually eat up resources, and I've found that if I start with nice -n 19 (lowest priority) it will still respond well enough, and not slow down the host very much.
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Old 5th August 2008
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Hello,

Quote:
Originally Posted by scottro View Post
For a situation like that, I think VirtualBox will be your best choice. See my http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu/vmcomp.html

(Did I mention that page already in this thread? Well, it was probably on page one.)
The only argument against it would be if you need the XP machine to be a host on the LAN. However, setting up a bridged connection isn't overly difficult.
VMware-server (choose the current 1.6-whatever, not the beta 2.0) does the bridged networking out of the box but requires more resources in my opinion.
Lastly, one thing I do find is that any VM will gradually eat up resources, and I've found that if I start with nice -n 19 (lowest priority) it will still respond well enough, and not slow down the host very much.
Thanks. It may need to connect to the LAN - probably via Zenworks in the Windows. That would be needed to email the Office docs - unless I have access to those files from inside Linux (I've never set something like that up before, though - samba?).

I have a friend at work who uses VMWare running under Windows XP to emulate Windows XP that he uses to configure automated Windows installs. He sets the RAM that VMWare has access to so that it doesn't take all of it. I would imagine that VirtualBox would have similar configurability.
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Old 5th August 2008
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Yes, it's not RAM that's the issue, it's more CPU time. The docs that come with VBox aren't bad, they go through the limitations of NAT. It can get to the LAN, but the LAN can't get to it, at least not without more research than it took me to set up bridged networking. That is, it will have a default NAT address of 10.2.x.x (I think, maybe 10.1.x.x or even 10.0.x.x.) From that machine, on a 192.168.1.0/24 network, I can put in, for example, WinSCP, a GUI scp client for MS systems, and ssh by address to the host. I can reach the Internet. I can access other Windows hosts by IP---hrrm, possibly by name, but I've never tried. At work, I have it set up for bridged networking, and I no longer have any MS boxes on my home LAN. However, it can connect to say, a box running samba, again, I'm not sure if it requires the IP or can do it by name. So, it can get out without problem. However, the other machines on the LAN can't get in.

Again, setting up bridged networking isn't all that difficult, it's just not an out of the box thing at this point. Now that I've written an article about it (linked from the article mentioned above) it's almost trivial, since, like so many things in Unix and Unix like systems, it's not that it's complex, it's just that the documentation that will work is either hard to find or outdated.
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Old 5th August 2008
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Hello,

Could you please clear up my confusion. What is the host OS and the guest OS.

The way I'm thinking is that the host OS is the one that is running the virtualization software and the guest OS is the one that is being emulated by the virtualization software. Is my thinking correct?
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Old 5th August 2008
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That's right.

(Do I need extra characters to post?)
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Old 5th August 2008
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There was a minimum of 10 characters, I see no reason to keep this enabled ... So I disabled this feature.
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Old 5th August 2008
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Yay!
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Old 6th August 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JMJ_coder View Post
At work I am setting up a workstation for myself that will need virtualization. It will run Slackware 12.1 and will need to emulate Windows XP. The primary software that will be run will be MS Office and maybe some kind of vnc.
If the CPU supports hardware virtualisation (Intel VT-D, AMD SVM), I'd recommend KVM. It basically turns the host Linux kernel into a hypervisor, and provides full-virtualisation (which means you can run pretty much any OS as a guest). If you use Linux kernel 2.6.25 or 2.6.26 in the host, and KVM 71 or 72, then you can also use paravirtual network drivers in Windows to get near-native network speeds. There's work on a paravirtual block driver for Windows, that will eventually allow it to get near-native harddrive speeds as well.

Plus, you get a simple, standard VNC console to all of your virtual machines. No need to install rdesktop or VNC in the guest, and no need to use a standalone access tool like VMWare/VBox.

(Yeah, I'm a KVM pimp right now.)
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Old 6th August 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JMJ_coder View Post
Could you please clear up my confusion. What is the host OS and the guest OS.
The host OS is installed on the physical hardware.

The guest OS is installed into the virtual machine.
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Old 6th August 2008
JMJ_coder JMJ_coder is offline
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Hello,

Quote:
Originally Posted by phoenix View Post
If the CPU supports hardware virtualisation (Intel VT-D, AMD SVM), I'd recommend KVM. It basically turns the host Linux kernel into a hypervisor, and provides full-virtualisation (which means you can run pretty much any OS as a guest). If you use Linux kernel 2.6.25 or 2.6.26 in the host, and KVM 71 or 72, then you can also use paravirtual network drivers in Windows to get near-native network speeds. There's work on a paravirtual block driver for Windows, that will eventually allow it to get near-native harddrive speeds as well.

Plus, you get a simple, standard VNC console to all of your virtual machines. No need to install rdesktop or VNC in the guest, and no need to use a standalone access tool like VMWare/VBox.

(Yeah, I'm a KVM pimp right now.)
Thanks for the info. The system that they gave me is an older Pentium 4 single core ~2.4 GHz, so I don't think it's up to the task.
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Old 6th August 2008
JMJ_coder JMJ_coder is offline
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Hello,

I decided to use VirtualBox. It was a bear to try to install - and after all my trying, I still couldn't get it to compile. So, I opted for the pre-compiled binary with the non-open license.

I got that installed and I have an empty VM configured (I gave it - 256MB RAM, 10GB storage) that I'll install XP on tomorrow.
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