On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 8:26 AM, Mick <michaelkintz...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wednesday 31 Dec 2014 12:47:55 Sid S wrote: > > Vbox seems to be coming last by quite some margin in the intel tests! I also > read this article and it looks that vbox is thankfully doing better on AMD; > but there are differences in the versions and kernels used between the two > articles: >
I think you need to think about your use case. The requirements were for a workstation testing environment. I think performance (as long as somewhat reasonable) isn't going to be a big concern there vs ease of setup, ability to snapshot, convenience features like being able to group guests, being able to get the right environment easily, etc. You probably also want reasonable graphics performance if you're testing clients inside VMs. If performance makes the difference between being able to run the cluster you need to test on your workstation or not, then that becomes a factor. Otherwise it is a nice-to-have. If you're talking about running servers then performance becomes much more important. However, if you're running linux guests you should seriously consider containers, and if containers aren't the right solution you should also be looking at stuff like VMWare (I don't know how well the FOSS solutions do as far as enterprise-y features go). In any case, while not quite as simple as Virtualbox I've found that virt-manager is very easy to use once you've gotten networking set up (which isn't too hard to do under either openrc or networkd). I tend to use the GUI for setting things up and for graphical guests, and I used to create init.d scripts / units for the stuff that I subsequently moved to containers. You can go back-and-forth between the two (and to be fair you can do the same with virtualbox). One of the advantages of KVM is that it doesn't require tainting your kernel, and you don't have to remember to rebuild the module anytime you update your kernel. I've finally gotten to the point where I don't have any external modules on one of my boxes and I'm very happy with that (alas, my mythtv frontend needs nvidia-drivers - I don't think the hardware acceleration is as good with the kernel drivers though to be fair it has been a year or two since I last tried). -- Rich
