Recommendations For Home Virtualization? 384
An anonymous reader writes "I'll have to upgrade my home computers sometime in the next few months and I'm thinking it's time to swallow the virtualization pill. Besides the ease of switching between Windows and Ubuntu, I'm looking mainly for the ability to save machine state in order to be able to revert to a known working state. Googling turns up mostly guides from 2009 and earlier. Is VMWare ESX pretty much the way to go? Performance does matter — not for gaming but I am heavily into photography, so apps like Lightroom and Photoshop need to run well. Thanks for any insight."
Re:Well (Score:3, Insightful)
That depends...do you want one that functions autonomously, or do you want a cardboard cutout?
See here for research [wikipedia.org]****
****Note: Sarcasm
Don't do it (Score:5, Insightful)
I use VMWare Workstation for much of each day to run MS Office Apps, and it's very useful - but no VM performs well graphically.
Re:VitrtuaBox (Score:4, Insightful)
Desktop virtualization? (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean desktop virtualization? Do you need to run 2+ OSes at the same time? That's what virtualization is for. Or do you need to just suspend and restore states? You can get away with hibernation for that. Or do you mean go back in time to a known working configuration? Windows can do that (System Restore), but I don't really see why you would need that on your main machine. If you're trying stuff out, you should try it inside the VM anyway (you use Workstation or VirtualBox for that).
ESX is nice, but it's not what you think. You don't get a local console (last time I checked, anyway), you're supposed to access it from SSH or VNC. It also designed for datacenter stuff (like SAS disks and controllers. It doesn't support IDE for example). You're looking for VMWare Workstation (Paid) or VirtualBox (free for non-commercial use), which are pretty fast. Paravirtualization (ESX or XEN) will give ~98% speed on Linux (on a PV kernel) and Windows only works well if you use GPLPV drivers, otherwise is slow as hell.
I'd just recommemd you stay away from virtualization if you're just a desktop user. Unless you're trying out shareware/malware/stuff that can break your install. If you're upgrading, why not use the old machine to try ESX, XEN and other stuff and figure out yourself how you want to use it? Stick to dual-boot for now.
In my experience, don't. (Score:3, Insightful)
Your question gives me pause on a few different levels:
A) You're not familiar with this technology. This is probably not the best way to get indoctrinated with VM's.
B) Other options for 'ease of switching' exist, like a KVM, Wubi, etc. These are likely to give you a more satisfactory result.
C) "Performance does matter" - yeah, no. Nobody uses VM's to increase their performance. They use them to save money, increase density, etc.
The tech is cool and has a number of really novel applications, but 'home use' and 'performance' are probably not among them unless you're some kind of super nerd. And if you were, you'd be too busy trying things out to spend time asking slashdot... :)
Re:In my experience, don't. (Score:4, Insightful)
A) You're not familiar with this technology. This is probably not the best way to get indoctrinated with VM's.
Quite the opposite. its how I always learned the ins, outs and plain 'don't do this again-ness' of various computer systems. The alternative is to read the documentation and find out what the manufacturer wanted you to learn.
Still, IO and Gfx performance is not something a VM is good at. Did I mention I also learn a lot by reading slashdot? :)
Re:Desktop virtualization? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd recommend the exact opposite.
Virtualization rocks for keeping things separate. My personal machine has a quad core CPU with 8GB of RAM. I've got 2-3 VMs running most of the time so I can keep things separated and do different things. It also lets me have Linux, FreeBSD and Windows guests without the power/space requirements of multiple machines.
VMWare workstation is only about $200 or so (maybe even $150), and I gather Server is free (but at the time running it on Vista 64 wasn't very easy). The ability to snapshot machines or sandbox things is really awesome. It also allows me to have multiple dev environments set up which don't interfere with each other, and a quick linked clone of a machine gives me a disposable test-bed in about 3 minutes if I think I need something new and isolated.
The only thing I regret is that my CPU is one notch down from being able to do 64-bit guests because I wasn't aware of that at the time.
For me, a big machine with loads of RAM and disk and VMWare makes for a really sweet setup. If you've got the resources on the box, it really does make some things easy. Soon I'll migrate my second physical box (an old XP machine) into a VM so I can keep some legacy software installs going without worrying about an aging machine.
Re:Don't do it (Score:3, Insightful)
I would never ever do things that way. I'm setting this up for my gf, and the Windows virtual machine will be set up with no external network access of any kind. Having Windows as a host OS kills much of the benefit you get from virtualization.
Re:Don't do it (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would you put something that's a large target for viruses as a host? That doesn't make sense to me.
If you get a virus in Windows as a VM, you simply rollback to a previous state. You can't do that with a host as easily, and you lose the functionality of the PC while that's happening. If you run all your Windows machines in a VM, you can quickly switch to a backup copy without having to wait for some virus cleaner, disk defragmentation, system update that requires a reboot...
It just makes more sense to run a Linux host in most cases because of all the maintenance that happens in Windows systems.
Re:Give VirtualBox a try! (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux VM on a Windows host? Isn't that like building a cement house on top of a wooden foundation? :)
If VirtualBox makes that an attractive solution, then perhaps investigating other options like VMWare is worth it!