VirtualBox 5.0 RC3 Brings VMM Fixes, Takes Care Of Some KDE DnD Problems

[reub2000]

But the graphical performance of Virtualbox beats the pants of that of KVM with either VNC or SPICE every time.

That's the reason I use virtualbox too. I'm interested in virgil3d, but their website says that there is no roadmap. Looks like I'll be sticking with virtualbox for a while.

[reCAPTCHA]

So you who think VirtualBox is a bit behindhand, inform us please about other software which can virtualise Windows on Linux hosts, reliably supports physical disks (in five years I never had an issue with my Win7 installation which runs on SSD), solid state disks, 3D, seamless/unity mode,USB 3,
copy&paste and drag&drop in both directions, paravirtualisation, is easy on CPU, manages execution capacties (execution time actually) and number of CPUs, mounts ISO images from host, has tools to easy start and manage guest from command line, to import export appliance, clones machines, make snapshots, supports other popular virtual disk formats, and much more, and most of it under GPL2 license, for free.

[reCAPTCHA]

That might be true however I must say that I am very happy with kvm +libvirt + virtual-machine-manager (which works with virtualbox as well by the way ;-) )

On the server side though... virtualbox is a no go. The network performance is so terrible that it's almost an insult and the reliability of the snapshots is.... well, let's say that I don't dare to use them.

VMWare or KVM are definitely much better options than VirtualBox on the server side ( VMWare price skyrockets if you want to do *ANYTHING* beyond basic vm handling)

IIRC ESXi, and vSphere Client for its management were free for one socket machines... But I didn't check it in last few years. The tools were great, but considering performance I found VirtualBox to be much easier on CPU, compared to the ESXi I remember from that days.
Cannot comment network performance, but what kind of reliability issues did you have with VirtualBox or its snapshots? I use VirtualBox a lot, for years now, and I never had any reliability issues with it, except when I played with betas or preview releases.

[OlafLostViking]

I am using VirtualBox for testing out new distributions, but mainly as Windows VM since many producers of embedded stuff only have some Windows based development tools (and the USB pass-through for programmers just works^TM). Not fun - but I must say, the speed is quite good. The GUI does not feel slower than a native installation.

Honest question: Now, since recently, I am using a KVM based VM with Spice and virt-manager on ArchLinux as host (x86-64, nVidia proprietary driver for now) with an ArchLinux guest installation (x86-64) to test out KDE KF5 software. So it's as rudimentary as possibly: only base system, KF5/Plasma/KDE Applications and from the AUR (some kind of PPA or third party repository) spice-vdagent and xf86-video-qxl. But the GUI is certainly not comparable to a native install and C&P brings the VM to a crawl randomly. Sure, it's virtualised, but still I don't want a perceivable delay when typing fast. So a question to the forum members: is this some kind of problem on my side or is this to be expected from KVM setups until the new graphics stack arrives? (If it's the first, I'll try to fiddle around more. If it's the second, I'll stick to VirtualBox for the important stuff and won't risk to migrate too soon.)

Thank you for not FlameWaring

[ihatemichael]

I've been using VirtualBox at work to run Arch guests on Windows hosts and quite frankly VBox works better than vmware for this.

I tried vmware player too and I couldn't get the resolution to be native resolution on fullscreen with vmware, on vbox it just worked everytime.

[asdfblah]

I've been using VirtualBox at work to run Arch guests on Windows hosts and quite frankly VBox works better than vmware for this.

I tried vmware player too and I couldn't get the resolution to be native resolution on fullscreen with vmware, on vbox it just worked everytime.

No man, benchmarks say VBox is WORSE than EVERYTHING ELSE!!!!!1one

[reCAPTCHA]

No man, benchmarks say VBox is WORSE than EVERYTHING ELSE!!!!!1one

Fuck benchmarks. I mainly develop in Visual Studio, C# in the last time and I choose my VirtualBox VM over my Latitude which is also equiped with SSD and runs Win 7 not as a guest. Performance of that VM which has less than 6 GB of RAM asigned, three CPUs, system and main software on own physical SSD, Page file on virtual disk which resides on another SSD, some other stuff like database logs, text files, documents etc are on virtual disks arranged over different SATA disks.

That machine runs everthing so smoothly that I never come to idea to use Windows outside of a VM. It boots in about 8 sec, but that is not really relevant to almost anything.
Running three different VM with full desktops, along with lot of stuff runinng on their host is always a joy, because it works well, it is simple to configure, and it is Open Source.

No one is saying VirtualBox is the best virtualisation all rounder there is, but it definitely has its role and is probably one of the best option for most users.

[dragonn]

That might be true however I must say that I am very happy with kvm +libvirt + virtual-machine-manager (which works with virtualbox as well by the way ;-) )

On the server side though... virtualbox is a no go. The network performance is so terrible that it's almost an insult and the reliability of the snapshots is.... well, let's say that I don't dare to use them.

VMWare or KVM are definitely much better options than VirtualBox on the server side ( VMWare price skyrockets if you want to do *ANYTHING* beyond basic vm handling)

Virtualbox 5.0 uses KVM too and in my opinion they is a big diference i performenc

[slotdime]

I use vbox for developer tools for windows (so far), and seemless mode is very comfortable on debian/jessie/kde4.
Also not having to reconfig the vm for every wifi on each customer place is a very practical stuff .
For headless linux production servers qemu-kvm is realy smooth (read no X server) and easy to install/manage .

[Cyber Killer]

Those still using... I'll second the opinions, that already are here - VBox might be slow, but for easy & free (not to mention FLOSS) desktop virtualization there's really no competition for it. I'd even say that for a single user, who needs some compatibility layer for other legacy OS applications or for testing something new, it's really good enough. It's not a server solution, but that's obvious.