Red Hat's Virtual Machine Manager Finally Hits v1.0

[Rexilion]

it does, it supports all major virtualization solutions. just currious, why would anyone want qemu without kvm? xen works much better than qemu in case you don't have Vt

Never tried Xen because it was my understanding that Windows XP will not work if you don't have VT.

I only use virtualization for Windows XP actually. Windows Vista gave me the motivation to move to Linux for good. Windows XP is known to me and I'm comfortable using it. Furthermore, I use it to slipstream the 250+ updates on it's SP3 ISO which is IMHO quite convenient. Because Windows XP is now only for aged computers. And 250+ updates, especially Windows Updates, take a loooong time to process (still don't know why).

[justmy2cents]

it's a f***ing disgrace that KVM and virtmanager are so cumbersome to set up that a vast majority of Linux users use Virtualbox. My mom could set up Hyper-V on Windows 8, it's just a matter of installation of the feature and clicking through the wizard.
And I'm not talking about noob users here. I've seen veteran sysadmins, people who actually did try KVM, use Virtualbox because the former's GUI management tools are so lacking.

i think you are mistaken about what virt-manager is and what is not. but, let's go trough mistakes in your assumptions.
- the virt-manager provides wizzard like setup, easy as hell one for the fact. if those veteran admins couldn't follow trough, then they should be treated as your mom not as veterans
- since libvirtd and virt-manager were WIP, did those veterans actually check if distro does implement them well? i'm running it for years in production on RHEL and i saw 0 problems so far
- most people get stuck with the fact why it is kinda distant. virt-manager is nothing but interface to libvirtd. which makes sense once you figure out that you never run virt-manager for particular VM. once machine is set up and detailed, you either use remote display or virsh command.
- it is not interface you would run full time like virtual box or vmware, it makes no sense. in worst case scenario if you really want to run it. you run it on your workstation where you connect it to servers that run VMs and you get centralized access in matter of seconds

why does it require root and why it is not simple few clicks
- it is requiring root privileges because it was never intended to be run from desktop to run some temporary machine, but rather machine as part of running os setup
- it is requiring root privileges in order to provide privileged setups like passtrough and so on
- it enables all possible options since it is meant for sysadmins, virt-manager never was intended for your mom like characters. it is not let's create simple virtual machine, that is why you have boxes and likes where you create it with few clicks and guess what. boxes still uses libvirtd, the only difference is what it can and what it can't expose on user limitation

[justmy2cents]

Never tried Xen because it was my understanding that Windows XP will not work if you don't have VT.

I only use virtualization for Windows XP actually. Windows Vista gave me the motivation to move to Linux for good. Windows XP is known to me and I'm comfortable using it. Furthermore, I use it to slipstream the 250+ updates on it's SP3 ISO which is IMHO quite convenient. Because Windows XP is now only for aged computers. And 250+ updates, especially Windows Updates, take a loooong time to process (still don't know why).

yep, AFAIK you can only run some modified versions of Windows on Xen.

still, you can run windows on kvm without any problem, no need to resort to qemu. i know i do that for few servers that are maintained by other people in our production. but, they don't need 3d and so far they were nothing but impressed with performance. if you need 3d, then you need iommu compatible HW (Vt-x), then you can setup graphic card as pass trough and you get native graphic performance.

[Rexilion]

yep, AFAIK you can only run some modified versions of Windows on Xen.

still, you can run windows on kvm without any problem, no need to resort to qemu. i know i do that for few servers that are maintained by other people in our production. but, they don't need 3d and so far they were nothing but impressed with performance. if you need 3d, then you need iommu compatible HW (Vt-x), then you can setup graphic card as pass trough and you get native graphic performance.

I tried to use KVM without VT which was a performance disaster (this was a while back though). I have no VT, let alone VT-x .

[justmy2cents]

I tried to use KVM without VT which was a performance disaster (this was a while back though). I have no VT, let alone VT-x .

kvm without Vt does not exists, libvirtd sets it to qemu fallback in that case. it also spells that qemu is not what you're interested in either.

just checking one thing since more or less all hw comes with Vt long time now. did you check if option is not just disabled in BIOS (which is default setting in 99%) or is that machine really so old?

[Raven3x7]

I?m generaly happy with VirtualBox (to run different/old Linux distros usualy); is there a reason to prefer KVM? I?ve just browsed the KVM web site but there?s no comparison with VBox there that I could find.

There's some benchmark articles comparing Vbox to KVM on Phoronix. Generally speaking KVM is much faster and stable on Linux, but it's lacking 3D accel atm. Here's one article http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...lization&num=1
Xen could probably perform better in PV mode with LVM, but i think it's beside the point.

[stqn]

There's some benchmark articles comparing Vbox to KVM on Phoronix. Generally speaking KVM is much faster and stable on Linux, but it's lacking 3D accel atm. Here's one article http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...lization&num=1
Xen could probably perform better in PV mode with LVM, but i think it's beside the point.

I see, thanks. I?ll stick with VBox for the time being .

[pouar]

Actually the reason people use VirtualBox is for the Graphics Acceleration. It's the reason I'm still using VirtualBox.

[liam]

For me it's the other way around, kvm is so easy to install, virt-manager is a breeze to work with compared to the other products gui's and supports remote ssh connections, that i cba to go to all that trouble (dkms, heavily capped downloads) to install the others any more.

virt-manager may be missing some features, but not really essential ones imho. If anything the thing i miss most is simple grouping. And ever since zfs i don't really care about snapshoting the vm itselfs anyway so didn't miss that feature either.

But management is surely lacking from other os'es as virt-manager is linux only as far as i know and there are no good and simple webui's yet, stuff like ovirt feels more like a distro and is was to intrusive for my taste. But i must say i haven't checked for a good webui for some time.

What was the issue with ovirt?

[mcloud]

just checking one thing since more or less all hw comes with Vt long time now. did you check if option is not just disabled in BIOS (which is default setting in 99%) or is that machine really so old?

There are newish chips with no vt