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?
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.
ibm is going to buy the entire ansible-verse; so be ready.
i will weep with you in solidarity. 😉
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.
Thanks for the tip!
KVM, QEMU are the most common solutions here
virt-manager is my go-to. There’s also Gnome Boxes, but I’ve never used it myself. virt-manager is the best I’ve tried, personally. Both use KVM, so they should be much more resource efficient
There’s nothing better than virtual box for desktop environments, especially after you install the guest tools.
I don’t know what you mean by “it eats resources” - of course it does, you’re emulating and entire system. What are your expectations?
Virtual Box is a Type 2 hypervisor, which means it’s running on top of the OS, and not directly on the hardware.
KVM is a Type 1, which runs directly on the hardware itself.
There are pros and cons to each, and VBOX is a great piece of software, but it is more resource intensive than other options available.
And it performs very well, especially for gui applications. It even supports multiple monitors for the guest.
For running a desktop it’s clearly superior and “fast enough”. I used it to run my primary development environment for years.
VMware workstation is free, it’s not open source but it’s faster than VirtualBox, if you want GPU passthrough KVM is the only choice but require quite bit of effort to setup
What about VMware Workstation Pro? Or are you looking for something FOSS? It’s easy to download without creating an account and I found it easier to setup that VB. I actually switched because I’d been having connectivity issues with VB and it took me a year to realise it was a VB issue.
https://virt-manager.org/ is a no brainer. Built upon libvirt/Qemu/KVM it’s way more powerful and pretty much just as easy to use. There is zero reasons to use anything else.
How easy is it to convert a VirtualBox machine+hdd to Virt Manager?
Pretty damn easy.
qemu-img convert -f vdi -O qcow2 Windows10.vdi Windows10.qcow2Here’s a more complete guide: https://cubiclenate.com/2024/05/30/converting-vdi-to-qcow2-step-by-step-guide-for-virt-manager-migration/
You can also run VirtualBox with KVM as a backend.
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.
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
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.
Definitely if you’re on Linux, use Qemu (and the best is to install a GUI to use it after)
Did you use virt-manager with it?
I use Quickemu for mine, makes it really quick and easy to get a new system up and running.
Using virt-manager, never tried quickemu
Really wish we could get in the habit of recommending GUIs first, not last.
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
