Does VirtualBox VM Have Much A Future Left?

[GreatEmerald]

Hah, nested virtualisation reminds me of the go-to way of running certain Xbox emulators: you run a 32-bit Windows VM (even on Windows, because WOW64 doesn't cut it), on which you run an Xbox emulator, and one of the few things that Xbox emulators can emulate is... UltraXLE, an N64 emulator. So that's Host -> 32-bit Windows -> Xbox -> N64. Yeap.

Of course, nowadays you're probably better off with xqemu

[duby229]

What I mean is that having a good command line is important, but objectively its going to be more efficient to manager for a user on a well done UI for a lot of things, particularly virtualization. I think VMware does it right, and we should take notes. That said I like what bhyve does when it uses the same console on FreeBSD without having to launch another terminal instance or connect in any way.

I do like VMWare. I use it quite a bit when I'm working. I wouldn't call it lite, but it does work very well. And VMWare actually cares about quality control, which is the best thing about it. I haven't tried using any of the BSDs in a while, so i don't know anything about bhyve. But, since you mentioned it, I googled it, and it sounds like it's pretty lite. Just the kind of app I like.

Thanks for the info. It's something worthwhile to look into.

[FuturePilot]

usermod -a -G libvirt yourusername

After reboot should work

Reboot isn't even necessary. Logout login should do it.

[FuturePilot]

What does QuickTime have to do with virtualization?

Why do you keep asking this?

[jimbohale]

Needless to say, I disagree.

Of course you can feel free to use whatever software you want to use, so it's all good. A desktop without a good command line is something pretty close to worthless in IMO.

What I mean is that having a good command line is important, but objectively its going to be more efficient to manager for a user on a well done UI for a lot of things, particularly virtualization. I think VMware does it right, and we should take notes. That said I like what bhyve does when it uses the same console on FreeBSD without having to launch another terminal instance or connect in any way.

[duby229]

Not afraid of the command line, sick of using it. We are in 2015 now. Servers are obviously command line but desktops? No thanks.

Needless to say, I disagree.

Of course you can feel free to use whatever software you want to use, so it's all good. A desktop without a good command line is something pretty close to worthless in IMO.

[jimbohale]

What's up with the command line phobia? It's strange hearing it on phoronix forums.

Not afraid of the command line, sick of using it. We are in 2015 now. Servers are obviously command line but desktops? No thanks.

[jimbohale]

Fuck Oracle.

But considering that libvirt based solutions don't work for me (something about permissions), VirtualBox is still my #1 choice.

usermod -a -G libvirt yourusername

After reboot should work

[opensource]

Like the other former software teams at Sun Microsystems, once being acquired by Oracle, things started going downhill.

That's what I was thinking when reading the headline. Fork it like the other projects. Oracle doesn't like open source software and we don't like oracle. Needless to say that no matter how big a company is, you can and should stop using their software if you are not short-sighted and care about open source software.

[duby229]

Sorry, that's not what I meant. I'm running KVM on a server at home. I connect to the server to manage/use the VMs with virt-manager. However, I couldn't find an easy way of running virt-manager on Windows. So when I have to do it from Windows I run VirtualBox, so I can run Linux where virt-manager feels at home. It's not a big deal - I could run dedicated VNC or Spice client on Windows. But I don't like to tinker with the VMs' setup with virsh - I use virt-manager to create and manage the VMs. It also has an integrated VNC/Spice viewer so I can easily get acces to the VM console.

As for Nested Virtualization - I think Xen and KVM support it. I don't know how stable or performant it is. Apparently, Haswell has some new feature which can reduce the overhead for Nested Virtualization. So you might want to make sure you have a Haswell-based CPU.

Cheers

Alright, thanks for the info. I'm really gonna have to give virt-manager a serious try. Seems like it's made a lot of progress since the last time a played with it. A few people on this thread seem to like it.