Hello,

Many months ago I had first installed a virtual machine, VMWare. I used
it for a few months and then never touched. IIRC, it was free for
students back then.


This week I looked it up again (I still have the virtual machines
installed) and wanted to reinstall the new version of VMWare Desktop. I
noticed that it is not free anymore but comes with a 30 day trial feature.


So, what free and preferably open source choices do we have for virtual
machines in Debian? Pros and cons based on your experiences will be
appreciated.


Thanks.
->HS


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H.S. wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> Many months ago I had first installed a virtual machine, VMWare. I used
> it for a few months and then never touched. IIRC, it was free for
> students back then.
>
> This week I looked it up again (I still have the virtual machines
> installed) and wanted to reinstall the new version of VMWare Desktop. I
> noticed that it is not free anymore but comes with a 30 day trial feature.
>
> So, what free and preferably open source choices do we have for virtual
> machines in Debian? Pros and cons based on your experiences will be
> appreciated.
>
> Thanks.
> ->HS
>
>
I was succesfully used kvm and qemu. There is also 'virtualbox-ose' in Debian archive.

- --
Eugene V. Lyubimkin aka JackYF, Ukrainian C++ developer.
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On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 04:48:14PM -0400, H.S. wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> Many months ago I had first installed a virtual machine, VMWare. I used
> it for a few months and then never touched. IIRC, it was free for
> students back then.
>
> This week I looked it up again (I still have the virtual machines
> installed) and wanted to reinstall the new version of VMWare Desktop. I
> noticed that it is not free anymore but comes with a 30 day trial
> feature.
>
> So, what free and preferably open source choices do we have for virtual
> machines in Debian? Pros and cons based on your experiences will be
> appreciated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_virtual_machines

is a start. I've used Qemu to run windows xp with no problems other
than it's slow. I use xen to run my server with three domU's (all etch
on an etch dom0), works great, though is probably overkill. It can be
a little fragile on a reboot, and definitely took a lot of learning to
get it all running properly.

A

On Thursday 17 July 2008 04:48:14 pm H.S. wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Many months ago I had first installed a virtual machine, VMWare. I used
> it for a few months and then never touched. IIRC, it was free for
> students back then.
>
> This week I looked it up again (I still have the virtual machines
> installed) and wanted to reinstall the new version of VMWare Desktop. I
> noticed that it is not free anymore but comes with a 30 day trial feature.
>
> So, what free and preferably open source choices do we have for virtual
> machines in Debian? Pros and cons based on your experiences will be
> appreciated.
>
> Thanks.
> ->HS

VMServer is still free of cost to use. VMWorkstation gives you some more
features and you need to purchase it. Both will work on Debian.

XEN is open source and is free of cost to use. It provides most if not all of
the features of VMServer/workstations and most of the benifits of ESX/Virtual
Center. XEN is more like ESX then VMServer, you boot Xen as your OS, then
you have separate vms running, interacting with the hardward. The GUI config
tools are not as sophisticated as ESX/Virtual Center, but the cost is much
much lower and you don't have to be concerned with licencing issues.. I have
not used XEN yet, I only researched it recently.

Virtual box http://www.virtualbox.org/

That is all I know on the subject, HTH.

--
Damon L. Chesser
damon@damtek.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/dchesser

Eugene V. Lyubimkin wrote:
> H.S. wrote:
>
> > So, what free and preferably open source choices do we have for virtual
> > machines in Debian? Pros and cons based on your experiences will be
> > appreciated.
>
>
> I was succesfully used kvm and qemu. There is also 'virtualbox-ose' in
> Debian archive.
>

I'm rather content with virtualbox-ose, but you have to be careful to
run a kernel with all the pieces needed (linux-image +
virtualbox-ose-modules to match). I'm currently running a -486 kernel
instead of the -amd64 I would prefer to run because of this, but, meh.

--
Kent West <*)))><
http://kentwest.blogspot.com


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Damon L. Chesser wrote:



VMServer is still free of cost to use. VMWorkstation gives you some more


er ... What is the difference between the two? (sorry, not much
experience with VM stuff).




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Kent West wrote:


I'm rather content with virtualbox-ose, but you have to be careful to
run a kernel with all the pieces needed (linux-image +
virtualbox-ose-modules to match). I'm currently running a -486 kernel


Can't the modules be built with module-assistant?

->HS


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H.S. wrote:


Hello,

Many months ago I had first installed a virtual machine, VMWare. I used
it for a few months and then never touched. IIRC, it was free for
students back then.


This week I looked it up again (I still have the virtual machines
installed) and wanted to reinstall the new version of VMWare Desktop. I
noticed that it is not free anymore but comes with a 30 day trial feature.


So, what free and preferably open source choices do we have for virtual
machines in Debian? Pros and cons based on your experiences will be
appreciated.


Thanks.
->HS


If you're going to be scripting the virtual machines and doing a lot of
fancy image construction/manipulation I'd recommend qemu. It's on-disk
file format is very flexible and easy to customize.


Otherwise, if you're just looking for something to run Windows under a
Linux GUI environment, I recommend VirtualBox.


-david


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Kent West wrote :

Eugene V. Lyubimkin wrote:

H.S. wrote:


So, what free and preferably open source choices do we have for virtual
machines in Debian? Pros and cons based on your experiences will be
appreciated.


I was succesfully used kvm and qemu. There is also 'virtualbox-ose' in
Debian archive.



I'm rather content with virtualbox-ose, but you have to be careful to
run a kernel with all the pieces needed (linux-image +
virtualbox-ose-modules to match). I'm currently running a -486 kernel
instead of the -amd64 I would prefer to run because of this, but, meh.



I'm happily using kvm for both casual testing from iso and running a
test server : it's lightweight, fast, highly tweakable and has never
misbehaved. Since it's now included in the kernel there is no need for
module updating after a kernel upgrade or any other vm-breaking "features".
If the lack of an UI is a problem for you, and outside of "virt-manager"
which I don't know, you can use "Qemulator" with a bit of tweaking : in
the preferences just change the path to executable to /usr/bin/kvm for
both x86 and x86_64 arch and remove references to Qemu. Leaves the "use
kqemu" preference as is, it will default to kvm if kqemu isn't loaded
(any other choice would mess things by adding some arguments to the
command line which kvm wouldn't understand).


Happy kvm !

Tom


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H.S. wrote:
> Damon L. Chesser wrote:
>
>>
>> VMServer is still free of cost to use. VMWorkstation gives you some
>> more
>
> er ... What is the difference between the two? (sorry, not much
> experience with VM stuff).

One thing that is different (at least in VMware server 1.0.X) is that
VMware server does not allow multiple snapshots, VMware Workstation does.


--
Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.
-- Robert Heinlein

Eduardo M KALINOWSKI
eduardo@kalinowski.com.br
http://move.to/hpkb


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