On 01/31/2012 10:58 AM, Bruce Dubbs wrote: > > What are the advantages/disadvantages of VB over Xen and KVM? If it > doesn't add any significant capabilities, I don't see the effort to make > it fit into BLFS as useful. > > -- Bruce
Note: I'm not gonna fight for or against VB, just throwing out the two known selling points as requested. I could happily use QEMU for my purposes (just haven't messed with it in probably 5 years or so). I just selected VB for my own use because it is cross-platform and I happen to use it at work as a goto quick solution. There are a couple of advantages with VB, but it really depends on your needs. One cool feature of VB is that it provides remote console access without installing a dedicated management program. It uses Microsoft's RDP for this. Of course, ease of use depends on whether you must already manage Windows hosts, which I do. I use Remmina on Linux (and could presumably use on any BSD though I haven't), 2XS on Android, and the Microsoft clients on MS and OS X. That said, I have never bothered to use the VB RDP server. I just tried adding it as an unprivileged user on my local installation using the GUI and it failed (as expected). A feature that is not really too useful unless running headless. I can see where it could be useful if the guest runs a GUI, as opposed to setting up SSH tunneling and VNC or remote X, but the only VM I run with a GUI is the Ubuntu one I use for Android devel, which I run locally. The other feature (which again, I don't use) is the Web server. I guess it provides both remote management and remote access via browser. Does Xen or QEMU bring a GUI management tool of any sort? That could be another point for VB I guess, as well as the two above. Free Xen Server used to have a limit where you couldn't use multiple physical NICs, I unfortunately do not know anything about the open source variant, I've never bothered with it since VB worked for what I needed it to do. All of the above will open VMDK and VDI disk image formats, and probably others. VB also includes conversion tools for virtual disks (as does QEMU), but that's fairly easy to do in a VM as well, just mount both old and new and use whatever tool you'd use for cloning on hardware. Also do any support running guest programs in the host WM...I believe they refer to this as "rootless" windows. That could be a cool feature for one or more of them. VB doesn't AFAIK. -- DJ Lucas -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content, and is believed to be clean. -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
