Which virtualization software should I choose
Hi, Just upgraded to Fedora 11 and (yet again) having issues with VMware Workstation. VMware still doesn't support Fedora (as a host) and I'm tired of fixing/patching things, again and again. I need to run several Windows versions (95 up to Vista for now) for our winetest and I really like the snapshot possibilities of VMware. Suggestions, recommendations? -- Cheers, Paul.
2009/6/11 Paul Vriens <paul.vriens.wine(a)gmail.com>:
Hi,
Just upgraded to Fedora 11 and (yet again) having issues with VMware Workstation.
VMware still doesn't support Fedora (as a host) and I'm tired of fixing/patching things, again and again.
I need to run several Windows versions (95 up to Vista for now) for our winetest and I really like the snapshot possibilities of VMware.
Suggestions, recommendations?
-- Cheers,
Paul.
I'm using VirtualBox. Apart from some problems around d3d/opengl and interruptions, it works quiet well. It also manages snapshots and have a CLI. See w2k-sp4-fr results on winetest. It has passed the test suite once (I didn't run latest builds but I will). Unfortunately, I don't know VMWare Workstation at all, so I can't tell you what are the differences. -- Nicolas Le Cam
On 06/11/2009 11:30 AM, Nicolas Le Cam wrote:
2009/6/11 Paul Vriens<paul.vriens.wine(a)gmail.com>:
Hi,
Just upgraded to Fedora 11 and (yet again) having issues with VMware Workstation.
VMware still doesn't support Fedora (as a host) and I'm tired of fixing/patching things, again and again.
I need to run several Windows versions (95 up to Vista for now) for our winetest and I really like the snapshot possibilities of VMware.
Suggestions, recommendations?
-- Cheers,
Paul.
I'm using VirtualBox. Apart from some problems around d3d/opengl and interruptions, it works quiet well. It also manages snapshots and have a CLI. See w2k-sp4-fr results on winetest. It has passed the test suite once (I didn't run latest builds but I will).
Unfortunately, I don't know VMWare Workstation at all, so I can't tell you what are the differences.
Just installed VirtualBox and it does have snaphots but not so extensive as VMware. In VMware I have some W2K snapshots: - out-of-the-box - SP1 - SP2 - SP3 - SP4 + Windows Update I can freely choose which I want to go to. Not so with VirtualBox I'm afraid as they are all on top of each other. (I guess for now I keep my other, F10, box around). -- Cheers, Paul.
2009/6/11 Paul Vriens <paul.vriens.wine(a)gmail.com>:
On 06/11/2009 11:30 AM, Nicolas Le Cam wrote:
2009/6/11 Paul Vriens<paul.vriens.wine(a)gmail.com>:
Hi,
Just upgraded to Fedora 11 and (yet again) having issues with VMware Workstation.
VMware still doesn't support Fedora (as a host) and I'm tired of fixing/patching things, again and again.
I need to run several Windows versions (95 up to Vista for now) for our winetest and I really like the snapshot possibilities of VMware.
Suggestions, recommendations?
-- Cheers,
Paul.
I'm using VirtualBox. Apart from some problems around d3d/opengl and interruptions, it works quiet well. It also manages snapshots and have a CLI. See w2k-sp4-fr results on winetest. It has passed the test suite once (I didn't run latest builds but I will).
Unfortunately, I don't know VMWare Workstation at all, so I can't tell you what are the differences.
Just installed VirtualBox and it does have snaphots but not so extensive as VMware. In VMware I have some W2K snapshots:
- out-of-the-box - SP1 - SP2 - SP3 - SP4 + Windows Update
I can freely choose which I want to go to. Not so with VirtualBox I'm afraid as they are all on top of each other.
(I guess for now I keep my other, F10, box around).
-- Cheers,
Paul.
I thought it was possible but never tried as I'm just using an up-to-date clean install, it suffices for my needs. If I have some time I'll try more things with those snapshots. -- Nicolas Le Cam
2009/6/11 Paul Vriens <paul.vriens.wine(a)gmail.com>:
Just installed VirtualBox and it does have snaphots but not so extensive as VMware. In VMware I have some W2K snapshots:
- out-of-the-box - SP1 - SP2 - SP3 - SP4 + Windows Update
I can freely choose which I want to go to. Not so with VirtualBox I'm afraid as they are all on top of each other.
(I guess for now I keep my other, F10, box around).
You can get this behaviour, but not using snapshots (which as you noticed are cumulative, and rolling back one snapshot deletes its changes). What you do is install your "out-of-the-box" version in a new drive image, then mark that as "immutable". AFAIK, you still have to do that from the command-line, and it's not really intuitive. Something like: 1) De-register your "out-of-the-box" drive image from all VMs you have configured 2) $ vboxmanage closemedium disk <filename> 3) $ vboxmanage openmedium disk <filename> --type immutable 4) Re-associate your VMs to the "out-of-thebox" image. It will inform you now that it is immutable. You can then create as many VMs as you need with the "immutable" image as the base, and it will automagically create differencing images for you, which you can install the service packs in. The disadvantage of this is you have multiple VM configurations, all of which have independent settings, but this is what I do for my WinXP browser testing (so I have multiple different versions of IE/Opera/other browsers that don't like other versions existing on the same installation :) ).
Paul Vriens wrote:
Just upgraded to Fedora 11 and (yet again) having issues with VMware Workstation.
VMware still doesn't support Fedora (as a host) and I'm tired of fixing/patching things, again and again.
I need to run several Windows versions (95 up to Vista for now) for our winetest and I really like the snapshot possibilities of VMware.
Suggestions, recommendations? I'm using KVM/Qemu with libvirt aka virt-manager. I have problems with WinNT and NetBSD; those hang/crash during the install. Win2k3, FreeBSD and OpenSolaris work just fine and I didn't try anything else yet. But I'm on F9 and once I have a little spare time I'll move to F11. I'll test it there (never qemu) if that fixes WinNT.
bye michael
2009/6/11 Michael Stefaniuc <mstefani(a)redhat.com>:
Paul Vriens wrote:
I need to run several Windows versions (95 up to Vista for now) for our winetest and I really like the snapshot possibilities of VMware. Suggestions, recommendations?
I'm using KVM/Qemu with libvirt aka virt-manager. I have problems with WinNT and NetBSD; those hang/crash during the install. Win2k3, FreeBSD and OpenSolaris work just fine and I didn't try anything else yet. But I'm on F9 and once I have a little spare time I'll move to F11. I'll test it there (never qemu) if that fixes WinNT.
Since you're asking on the Wine list ... VirtualBox does okay for Windows and Linux, barely for FreeBSD with lots of caveats and not really for anything else. Notably, OpenBSD doesn't work and the VirtualBox developers admit it but consider the bug beneath their attention. It's really not a very well-written virtualisation app. VMWare is reputedly better - it's the oldest common VM software and its emulation is very seasoned, well-tested and robust. QEMU *without* KVM works well, if slowly - it's almost a complete "red pill" for the guest OS. With KVM, OpenBSD is known not to work entirely properly. (OpenBSD is a bit of a torture test for virtual machines. It's very wary and cautious about what it runs on, and will happily segfault at a perceived hardware problem rather than risk letting a program access memory it shouldn't. Theo de Raadt says about a third of all problem traces come from VMs.) For testing Wine in other OSes, bugs found in a VM should always, always be confirmed on a physical machine, with the OS running on the bare metal - there are too many "glitches in the Matrix" in almost any VM software to be sure a bug is real. - d.
On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 7:58 AM, David Gerard<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
VirtualBox does okay for Windows and Linux, barely for FreeBSD with lots of caveats and not really for anything else. Notably, OpenBSD doesn't work and the VirtualBox developers admit it but consider the bug beneath their attention. It's really not a very well-written virtualisation app.
Virtualbox works great for OpenSolaris as well. -- -Austin
2009/6/11 Austin English <austinenglish(a)gmail.com>:
On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 7:58 AM, David Gerard<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
VirtualBox does okay for Windows and Linux, barely for FreeBSD with lots of caveats and not really for anything else. Notably, OpenBSD doesn't work and the VirtualBox developers admit it but consider the bug beneath their attention. It's really not a very well-written virtualisation app.
Virtualbox works great for OpenSolaris as well.
*cough* Yes, I expect it would :-) (explanation: Sun owns VirtualBox, you can be very sure their own OS runs like a charm!) - d.
On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 11:22 AM, David Gerard<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2009/6/11 Austin English <austinenglish(a)gmail.com>:
On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 7:58 AM, David Gerard<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
VirtualBox does okay for Windows and Linux, barely for FreeBSD with lots of caveats and not really for anything else. Notably, OpenBSD doesn't work and the VirtualBox developers admit it but consider the bug beneath their attention. It's really not a very well-written virtualisation app.
Virtualbox works great for OpenSolaris as well.
*cough* Yes, I expect it would :-)
(explanation: Sun owns VirtualBox, you can be very sure their own OS runs like a charm!)
I'm well aware...though, interestingly, sound is broken out of the box and requires compiling your own oss driver :-/ -- -Austin
On 06/11/2009 02:58 PM, David Gerard wrote:
2009/6/11 Michael Stefaniuc<mstefani(a)redhat.com>:
Paul Vriens wrote:
I need to run several Windows versions (95 up to Vista for now) for our winetest and I really like the snapshot possibilities of VMware. Suggestions, recommendations?
I'm using KVM/Qemu with libvirt aka virt-manager. I have problems with WinNT and NetBSD; those hang/crash during the install. Win2k3, FreeBSD and OpenSolaris work just fine and I didn't try anything else yet. But I'm on F9 and once I have a little spare time I'll move to F11. I'll test it there (never qemu) if that fixes WinNT.
Since you're asking on the Wine list ...
I'm using VMware only for running winetest on Windows, so there is some relevance.
VirtualBox does okay for Windows and Linux, barely for FreeBSD with lots of caveats and not really for anything else. Notably, OpenBSD doesn't work and the VirtualBox developers admit it but consider the bug beneath their attention. It's really not a very well-written virtualisation app.
VMWare is reputedly better - it's the oldest common VM software and its emulation is very seasoned, well-tested and robust.
I've been a happy user of VMware Workstation from the very start but it always annoyed me that they don't support Fedora.
QEMU *without* KVM works well, if slowly - it's almost a complete "red pill" for the guest OS. With KVM, OpenBSD is known not to work entirely properly.
(OpenBSD is a bit of a torture test for virtual machines. It's very wary and cautious about what it runs on, and will happily segfault at a perceived hardware problem rather than risk letting a program access memory it shouldn't. Theo de Raadt says about a third of all problem traces come from VMs.)
For testing Wine in other OSes, bugs found in a VM should always, always be confirmed on a physical machine, with the OS running on the bare metal - there are too many "glitches in the Matrix" in almost any VM software to be sure a bug is real.
That's basically true for most applications. Most vendors have these caveats in there support contracts. Maybe I just revert to F10 for now and wait till VMware can properly install/run on F11 (It's mostly issues with compilation and dealing with newer kernel versions, 2.6.29/30). F11 doesn't do OSS (by default) anymore which means no out-of-the-box sound in VMware Workstation 6.5.2 The problem with both VirtualBox and QEMU/KVM seems to be supporting older Windows versions as guests (< NT4). -- Cheers, Paul.
2009/6/11 Paul Vriens <paul.vriens.wine(a)gmail.com>:
The problem with both VirtualBox and QEMU/KVM seems to be supporting older Windows versions as guests (< NT4).
Yeah. Try QEMU without KVM on a very fast host machine, your ancient Windows should run just as well as it would on a 486 ;-) - d.
Paul Vriens wrote:
The problem with both VirtualBox and QEMU/KVM seems to be supporting older Windows versions as guests (< NT4). I don't understand VirtualBox says it supports up to Windows 7 and I have XP running. I have had QEMU/KVM running XP. What annoyed me about VMWare Server was the broken SeLinux which eventually forced me to look around for another VM.
Jeff Latimer wrote:
Paul Vriens wrote:
The problem with both VirtualBox and QEMU/KVM seems to be supporting older Windows versions as guests (< NT4). I don't understand VirtualBox says it supports up to Windows 7 and I have XP running. I have had QEMU/KVM running XP. What annoyed me about VMWare Server was the broken SeLinux which eventually forced me to look around for another VM.
I just had look at: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Guest_OSes I didn't check myself. -- Cheers, Paul.
On Thursday 11 June 2009 14:58:14 David Gerard wrote:
VMWare is reputedly better - it's the oldest common VM software and its emulation is very seasoned, well-tested and robust.
If you discount that last I checked, VMware still couldn't do IPv6 in their virtual networks, and every single kernel upgrade your distro does is a pain. There's always something, I guess. Kai -- Kai Blin WorldForge developer http://www.worldforge.org/ Wine developer http://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin Samba team member http://www.samba.org/samba/team/ -- Will code for cotton.
2009/6/12 Kai Blin <kai.blin(a)gmail.com>:
On Thursday 11 June 2009 14:58:14 David Gerard wrote:
VMWare is reputedly better - it's the oldest common VM software and its emulation is very seasoned, well-tested and robust.
If you discount that last I checked, VMware still couldn't do IPv6 in their virtual networks, and every single kernel upgrade your distro does is a pain. There's always something, I guess.
It's closed-source software for stable enterprise environments; people like us are as the buzzing of flies to such elevated beings. The quality of the VM is superb though. - d.
Kai Blin wrote:
On Thursday 11 June 2009 14:58:14 David Gerard wrote:
VMWare is reputedly better - it's the oldest common VM software and its emulation is very seasoned, well-tested and robust.
If you discount that last I checked, VMware still couldn't do IPv6 in their virtual networks, and every single kernel upgrade your distro does is a pain.
There's always something, I guess. Kai
FWIW, I'm back on F10 with VMware Workstation 6.5.2. I don't have the time right now to convert all my virtual systems to VirtualBox (or the likes). With respect to IPv6, I'm not supposed to disclose any beta information ;) -- Cheers, Paul.
participants (8)
-
Austin English -
Ben Klein -
David Gerard -
Jeff Latimer -
Kai Blin -
Michael Stefaniuc -
Nicolas Le Cam -
Paul Vriens