On Wednesday, December 31, 2014 09:42:11 AM Rich Freeman wrote: > On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 8:26 AM, Mick <michaelkintz...@gmail.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,
The thing lacking from KVM (and I believe also Containers) is that the memory contents are not included in snapshots. Making the snapshots basically result in an unclean-shutdown scenario. Which is ok-ish as a backup, but not when testing different steps where a quick and easy roll-back is often required. > 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). I compared the ease-of-use and performance between XenServer, VMWare and VirtualBox. VMWare generally is the slower of the three. Also, the weird errors occuring when VMs are migrated between nodes in a VMWare cluster makes me worry every time I hear it's being used for critical systems. > 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, That is an advantage of KVM and Xen over Virtualbox and VMWare. > 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). I tend to use the nvidia-drivers where I need graphics. But those machines are not VMs. If graphical performance is a requirement, NVidia cards (apart from the expensive professional ones) are best avoided. They are actively crippled in a VM environment. -- Joost
