VirtualBox is ridiculously simple to set up and get virtual machines going. Shared folders, shared clipboard and much more are no issue.
But.
It eats resources. The installed virtual machines (VM) run relatively slow. What have you found to be feature comparable - and most importantly more resource-efficient - alternatives for running VMs under Linux?
Virt-manager with qemu-system, although if you use the kvm driver for both performance should be about the same I think.
Don’t forget virtualbox has a lot of configuration options that may improve performance, Ive never had a problem with it but also never need high performance from a VM.
Might be that you really don’t need VMs but just lightweight namespace containers. If so, you can use docker/podman, systemd-nspawn or various other tools. The overhead will be less than 1% if you stay within the same architecture as your host.
You can specify the virtualization engine in VirtualBox, including KVM.
A couple of easy virtualization tools that allow you to create VMs in a few clicks are Gnome Boxes and QuickEmu, which leverages Qemu and KVM
Definitely if you’re on Linux, use Qemu (and the best is to install a GUI to use it after)
I’ve looked at it. It comes up a lot. Thank you.
Really wish we could get in the habit of recommending GUIs first, not last.
Really wish we wouldn’t have to separate the two. This adds a complication layer for exiting Windows users.
Ideally: install app (insert name). Run and enjoy.
Without any kind of software behind GUI this is almost useless and I think that CLI (or even TUI) are today so underrated that we should give more and more power to them instead of GUI
I use Quickemu for mine, makes it really quick and easy to get a new system up and running.
Qemu/Kvm or VMware(Sadly only works on some distros and vmware works best with Windows)
Surprised no one is saying Xen
Qemu
works decently enough for me is https://virt-manager.org/ to deal with libvirt. its not quite as nice in some ways but way less resource intensive.
I agree. The only feature where I’d say it’s weaker feature-wise is it doesn’t have any form of virtual GPU acceleration - either you deal with software rendering or have to pass through a graphics card (I’ve done it, but it’s not easy.).
Otherwise, I’d say it tends to run better than VirtualBox, though it’s been years since I last used Vbox anyhow. A plus is Virt Manager comes in most distro repos, whereas VirtualBox doesn’t. Also, it allows you to directly edit the XML, so you can do some cool stuff that would be really annoying (not impossible) to do in VirtualBox.
actually, you can do vulkan passthrough if the guest machine is also linux
Vagrant by Hashicorp.
Edit: if the news of IBM acquiring them goes through, I will cry. And we live in the worst timeline, so it’ll happen.
While it wasn’t a requirement, be aware that Vagrant (along with all Hashicorp products) are no longer free software and are instead under the Business Software Licence.
ibm is going to buy the entire ansible-verse; so be ready.
i will weep with you in solidarity. 😉
You can also run VirtualBox with KVM as a backend.
I’ve been using Virt-Manager with KVM/Qemu and don’t have any complaints.
Under Linux, the recommended route is KVM/Qemu, with Virt-Manager as the GUI front-end for them. You will need to follow tutorials to install it correctly, as it requires special steps, e.g. adding them to specific usergroups. But once it works, it works well.
Not for the faint of heart, but I’ll keep it in mind.
I recall I had to do like one thing to get it working outside of just apt install but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was. I just put the error in a web search and found what was needed to deal with it.
definitely not as easy as virtualbox
Gnome Boxes is about as easy as virtual box, and wont break your kernel.
Yea, the installation isn’t too difficult. Looking at my groups as well I think it’s only the
libvirtgroup that you have to add a user to for KVM/QEMU with Virt-Manager, but the same could be said for VirtualBox as I believe you have to still add the user to thevboxusersgroup if you were to install it instead.
I haven’t used it nearly as much as VirtualBox but Boxes (flatpak) is definitely a breeze to use. It uses KVM under the hood I think. If your use cases are complicated it might abstract away too much though.
I don’t know if it’s more resource-efficient, but when I wanted to start using VMs for work, I knew VirtualBox would not be a viable choice (thanks to Oracle and their horrible licensing), so I chose GNOME Boxes and have been pretty happy with it. I didn’t do any tests so I can’t say for certain , but it doesn’t seem like the resource consumption is that much different.
Virtualbox should not run slowly in terms of compute. Make sure your allocating enough cores and memory, and VT/AMD-V is enabled in the BIOS of the host. Also Guest additions should be installed. Not sure but that might help IO speeds.
What might be slow, Graphics may not be acceralerated. Exactly what VM software to use, what it works with, and actually getting it to work can be challanging. Installing guest drivers though is probably required.
For Linux KVM solutions are probably preferred and more native solution but more technical to use. Getting graphics acceleration with KVM has been challenging, though may be possible. KVM is used widely on servers, but is not that desktop friendly.
All VM solutions are resource intensive. Use containers and/or native software to reduce/avoid that.
Edit: I myself have used VirtualBox but these days I use KVM including on my workstation.
