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

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 8:26 AM, Mick <michaelkintzios@×××××.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