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."
Give VirtualBox a try! (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.virtualbox.org/
Re:VitrtuaBox (Score:4, Interesting)
+1 for VirtualBox. Why you'd use ESX I have no idea. I'd probably second choice VMWare Server, which is also free and works equally well.
VMWare rocks for video (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm running 64-bit linux host with VMware Workstation and a Windows XP guest.
Performance all around is very very good. If you full screen the guest, you can't tell that it's running virtual unless you check for the VMware icon.
Video performance is OUTSTANDING, essentially native. Netflix videos play full screen with very little CPU overhead.
Suspend and resume can be slow if your guest has lots of RAM.
I recommend using XFS for the filesystem containing your VMware images. I've tried other filesystems but nothing can touch XFS when it comes to handling those enormous virtual disk files.
Re:One acronym: KVM (Score:3, Interesting)
KVM isn't perfect, and does lack some of the polish and features of products like Xen and VMWare, but in raw performance it kicks serious ass. However, it is not as easy as Virtualbox, so for home or desktop virtualization, VirtualBox gets my vote.
Re:VitrtuaBox (Score:3, Interesting)
I use ESXi on a box at home to host about 6 VMs. the base OS is about 70MB so it's got a tiny footprint on the server and most of the resources go to the VMs. For a dedicated box it's a great solution. For running VMs on a computer that's doing more than that VirtualBox is great.
Re:A few suggestsions (Score:2, Interesting)
You can use http://pve.proxmox.com/ [proxmox.com] for a KVM OpenVZ virtualization machine, management is web enabled and you could log to the machines by openVNC, somewhere there is a howto to enable SPICE for better multimedia integration.
If you could affored a Redhat Virtualization for Desktops it could be an interesting option as SPICE is enabled as default.
Regards.
Re:VirtualBox (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:VitrtuaBox (Score:3, Interesting)
I have three basic systems at home:
The desktop and notebook have usually one or occasionally two guests open. The ESXi host runs about a dozen guests simultaneously, including a fairly complete Windows 2008 R2 domain, a Linux server, a Linux workstation, and a Windows XP guest. A Windows 7 guest is also present, but isn't usually running, and I have test systems in place for various other OSes from Windows 2000 to Ubuntu to Damn Vulnerable Linux.
I have bogged it down when running a lot through it from time to time, but I was able to install eight Windows 2008 systems more or less simultaneously in under a day, patches and domain creation and joining included. I did learn that assigning appropriate memory to the virtual video cards is important, as the default 8MB drags until a remote desktop solution becomes available. The cost for the ESXi system came in at about $1000, including an Intel gigabit NIC, as ESXi doesn't recognize the onboard NIC in most desktop motherboards.
It might be more than what is being sought here, but it works well for me, and has dramatically reduced the clutter in my home office.
Re:Give VirtualBox a try! (Score:4, Interesting)
I have VirtualBox on a new iMac with Ubuntu and WinXP VMs running just perfectly.
It's a really nice system. Much smaller than VMWare too.
Re:Give VirtualBox a try! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Give VirtualBox a try! (Score:3, Interesting)
I consider myself fairly competent when it comes to computers/Linux/Windows and I was never able to get Xen to do anything but throw errors and waste hard drive space... things may have changed in the past year and a half or so since I tried, but VirtualBox is dead simple to create and manage VMs. (It has a GUI for one.)