Re: [gentoo-user] VMs - what technology would you advise?

[Mick]

On Tuesday 30 Dec 2014 22:01:00 Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 2:52 PM, Mick <michaelkintzios@×××××.com> wrote:
> > For years now I have been running VirtualBox for testing purposes.
>
> I used to run vbox, but ran into some issues along the way and
> switched to KVM, with virt-manager as a front-end.  It is a bit more
> complicated to get bridged networking set up, but it doesn't require
> any 3rd-party kernel modules to run.  You might want to look into it.
> It isn't as user-friendly as VirtualBox, but all the features are FOSS
> (I forget if all the VirtualBox features are open-source - haven't
> used it in a while).  You can run VMs via the front-end, or as
> daemons/etc.
>
> This wouldn't really fit your needs, but in general I'd advise anybody
> doing virtualization of linux guests to consider running containers
> instead.  They are fairly mainstream technology now - the isolation
> isn't as good as virtualization from a security standpoint, and I have
> no idea if you can use one with a graphical console, but otherwise
> they give you almost all the benefits of running a linux guest with
> much better performance and far less overhead (no double-caching,
> etc).  I've been moving to containers for more of my daemons as it
> generally reduces the hassle of updates (more updates to do, but when
> you do an update only one service can break at a time).  Containers
> can even get their own network interfaces/IPs/etc - just like a VM.


Thank you All, it seems that VM is probably still the simplest solution for my 
needs.  I thought of looking into containers, but a few of the VMs are 
MSWindows.

Also thank you Alec for pointing out selenium.  I expect it would be useful 
for automating the testing of more complex websites and web apps.

-- 
Regards,
Mick