the best virtual machine for Linux: qemu, kvm, xen, virtual box, parallels, vmware

[elch]

Qemu is recommendable over VMware and VirtualBox if your CPU supports KVM. It is more lightweight and in my opinion more powerful. But if your CPU is not virtualization-aware, Qemu with Windows XP is rather unusable.

[lkub]

Thank you for your advice. My laptop (Lenovo T61) is running Windows 7 and has Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 processor. Do you by chance know if it supports KVM? And will Windows 7 behave better than Windows XP under Qemu?

Thanks again.

Originally Posted by elch

Qemu is recommendable over VMware and VirtualBox if your CPU supports KVM. It is more lightweight and in my opinion more powerful. But if your CPU is not virtualization-aware, Qemu with Windows XP is rather unusable.

Originally Posted by lkub

Thank you for your advice. My laptop (Lenovo T61) is running Windows 7 and has Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 processor. Do you by chance know if it supports KVM? And will Windows 7 behave better than Windows XP under Qemu?

KVM (for Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V).

My Core 2 Duo supports Intel VT.

Haven't tested Windows 7 on a virtual machine. There is no sense for me to waste that much hard disk space. All software that I need works fine in Windows XP. Windows 7 works on KVM and it is more secure than Windows XP. You have a license for Windows 7, so it is a better choice for you.

Virtualbox runs in Linux, Windows, Mac OS. It is pretty fast and it is free. This is probably everything that you need for a desktop.

VMWare is good for servers. It is scalable. You can use VMWare converter to convert physical OS to a virtual image.

Parallels offers really nice solutions that are often overlooked. Although Parallels Desktop for Mac OS X is well known by a Mac community. And I see Parallels Virtuozzo Containers used more and more often on servers.

Unlike VMware's ESX Server or Microsoft's Hyper-V, which virtualize the hardware level, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers virtualize at the OS level. This approach has its pros and cons. On the plus side, OS virtualization offers lower overhead: It provides excellent performance and uses fewer host resources. All containers (term used by Parallels for virtual machines) share the same OS level. There is no need for an extra level of hardware virtualization. On the downside, all containers use the same OS. A container can be imported from a physical OS or created from scratch.

Originally Posted by elch

Qemu is recommendable over VMware and VirtualBox if your CPU supports KVM. It is more lightweight and in my opinion more powerful. But if your CPU is not virtualization-aware, Qemu with Windows XP is rather unusable.

I've tried to install Qemu and I'm really impressed by its speed. And my Internet is working automatically on a guest OS. Another good thing is that I can use guest OS after hibernation, while VirtualBox has always been killing my Windows XP after that.

There are several problems I have with Qemu:

• USB drives and my USB headset are not mounted automatically. In VirtualBox I was able to do that automatically or with a couple of clicks.
• Can't find a way to use my NTFS disks with Qemu
  I've read that I can use the following option:
  

  -hdc fat:rw:/media/mydrive/

  (even though it is an NTFS drive), but can't make it work.
• Can't copy-paste from virtual machine to my Ubuntu or from my Ubuntu to my virtual machine.