Wil Reichert wrote:
On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 10:37 AM, Mark Knecht <markkne...@gmail.com> wrote:
So that's a couple of votes for Virtual-Box. (That's from Sun
correct?) emerge virtualbox-bin? It seems to want me to fetch
something first. I'll have to check into that.
There's also Xen, right? Is it too early for an Open Source alternative?
Theres also the kvm option as well. Its got tight kernel support so
theres no extranious modules to add & it runs Windows XP for me just
fine.
Some things to consider before choosing:
1. Does your hardware support hardware-level virtualization. VMWare
works on anything (as does virtualbox I believe). Some of the other
options require newer CPUs (last few years).
2. I think Xen requires a modified OS to run (at least it used to).
Things might be different today.
3. Do you need to run your virtual machines detached from a console or
outside of X11? That is what turned me off of just about all the
options other than VMWare-server - they only work if the console is
running in a window. With VMWare I can start up a virtual machine from
a command line (even on a server without X11), and then ssh or remote
desktop into the underlying server. I can attach a console at any time,
and I can detach a console at any time.
4. Do you care about licensing issues? Some of these options are open
source, and some are not. Some require proprietary kernel modules to
run. VMWare even requires you to register to get a license key (free
for the server edition).
5. Look at the larger feature set in terms of snapshotting and all that
stuff. If you just want to run windows on your gentoo box any of the
options will do. If you want to do more look at the larger feature
list. One thing I love is that if I have some untrusted executable I
want to try out on Windows I can just snapshot the VM and run away. If
I don't like the end result I can just hit revert and poof everything is
back to how everything started. (Just make sure that you're not running
on an account that has access to networked resources outside the sandbox
and that you don't have roaming profiles or anything that could cause
the changes to escape the snapshot.)
