Free/open source VM solutions

R

Red Squirrel

[H]F Junkie
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Nov 29, 2009
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I'm aware of VirtualBox, KVM, Xen (I think?), Qemu, and ESXi. Just curious, any others out there?

I am currently using VirtualBox, but I hate the way it organizes files, and if you want to move anything you break it all. I like having a folder per VM and everything in that folder, and I want to be able to locate it on my /data drive aka, not in /home. Also it's more of a desktop app, then server app.

I am looking at possibly switching to one of the other above free solutions. In my case I want something that installs in the OS, and not a hypervisor, as the host also does certain tasks such as DNS, Email, File etc...

I'm leaning towards KVM. Is that a good solution for production use?
 
I use VirtualBox for servers...it works wonders. It was a bit hard finding all the features but they were there to set it up nice. The only thing that I liked VMWare workstation more for was their all-consoles-in-one-window approach.
 
Do you want distros based around those technologies as well ?

Proxmox VE & XenServer come to mind...
 
If you don't need to take snapshots, VMware player is free. Latest version lets you create VM's (or P2V via free Standalone Converter), and edit the configuration.
 
Robstar said:
Do you want distros based around those technologies as well ?

Proxmox VE & XenServer come to mind...
Click to expand...

Not needed, in fact I prefer something that installs in CentOS fairly well. Though in the future I may just use a hypervisor and virtualize everything. Not sure yet.

I'm actually leaning towards KVM, but whenever I do research I don't find much on it as far as if it's reliable or what. Based off the site it sounds promissing, but is it really that good?

I did install it once and played with it real quick, but an install of windows took a good 3 hours, don't know why. Was not the fastest machine either.
 
I'm running VirtualBox + phpVirtualBox on my Ubuntu headless server, I have absolutely zero complaints. phpVirtualBox is still in development, so it's missing a few features, but that's understandable. Not mandatory to use a web front-end anyways :)
 
Red Squirrel said:
Not needed, in fact I prefer something that installs in CentOS fairly well. Though in the future I may just use a hypervisor and virtualize everything. Not sure yet.

I'm actually leaning towards KVM, but whenever I do research I don't find much on it as far as if it's reliable or what. Based off the site it sounds promissing, but is it really that good?

I did install it once and played with it real quick, but an install of windows took a good 3 hours, don't know why. Was not the fastest machine either.
Click to expand...

Yep. KVM is pretty good. I don't have any windows guests, however....so I can't speak about that.
 
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