On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 1:14 PM, walt<w41...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 09/06/2009 09:38 AM, 7v5w7go9ub0o wrote: >> >> walt wrote: >> [] >> >>> >>> I don't use vmware but I do use virtualbox every day and I love it. >>> It's extremely fast even compared to kvm, which I also use on my >>> newest machine with hardware virtualization support. >>> >> >> Some questions, please: >> >> 1. How would you contrast these two packages for "security" use? >> >> (I'm planning on setting up a server on my desktop, and would think >> running it in a VM would be appropriate) >> >> 2. Should someone get a shell in either of these VM clients, would they >> even be able to determine that they're not on hardware (using full >> virtualization)? >> >> 3. Do the VMs see themselves as being on a LAN (e.g. 192.168.x.x), or do >> they actually share the hardware with the host? >> >> 4. Do you communicate with them via, e.g. SSH and/or X? > > I'm not a computer professional, so I'm not the best one to give advice > about security. I can tell you that both vbox and kvm are built on top > of a qemu base so they share a lot of code. > > The principal advantage for vbox is its nice gui interface to the massive > list of qemu command-line options, and its highly optimized virtual graphics > driver, which is what make vbox faster than kvm. > > If you don't need the fancy fast graphics driver (for your server) then > it's just about a tossup between the two, both being based on qemu.(Oh, > but vbox is very fast even without hardware virtualization support, and > kvm isn't.) > > Networking is anywhere between trivial and a nightmare, depending on what > you need it to do. Both by default "just work" when a guest is talking to > the internet via your host machine, but then it's difficult communicating > with the guest locally. There are ways to do bridging, firewalling, making > a virtual lan between guests, and lots of fancy stuff, but then you really > need to know how to use all those fancy options (which I don't). > > I use both of them to run Windows guests using the default network settings > (no custom configuration whatever) and I use samba on the host to share > files > with the guests, which is very easy. > > I suspect that running a virtual server might require some network tweaking > to make a decent job of it, but I'm only guessing. > > I hope some experts can add to or correct the above.
Well, not an expert by any measure here, but I have been using Vbox for about a year (with a variety of both hosts and guests), and I will mention that networking with it is an absolute breeze 9 out of 10 times. Bridged connections, internal networks (client to client visible only, great for hosting mysql on one guest and apache on another), host-only (internal with a virtual connection into it on the host, only worked with this on Windows hosts), NATed connections through the host (not optimal for servers, but the default and great for initial builds and 'simple' work with a guest). I also run 3-4 guests at a time with no problem on my meager little Core 2 duo, 3.0ghz, 4gb ram. -- Poison [BLX] Joshua M. Murphy
