Hi everyone,

I have a use case for virtualisation, and would like to ask, if someone of you can give a recommendation, which technology to use.

Several years ago, long before Sun acquired Innotek, I used VirtualBox. At that time it was by far the easiest solution to set up, and I consider simplicity and ease of use still as key features. But recently I read that KVM/Qemu has made great progress, and as it is really free, I'd be interested to know, if it could be an alternative option for me.

As Xen and VMware are most likely still not for me, my question is:

Would you recommend KVM/Qemu or VirtualBox, and for what reason?

Thanks for sharing your experience!

gargamel

I've had limited experience of both of them, but the main difference is that KVM/Qemu is more versatile, can emulate more architectures than VirtualBox.

Well from experience, VirtualBox will probably be the best choice, that is if you go with the proprietary build. VB has better drivers, has better hardware acceleration features and fairly much has just about everything QEMU does and more. The only thing with QEMU is, it's open source.

So unless you're adamant about open source, go with VirtualBox, just don't get the OSE version. The OSE version doesn't support certain drivers and other nice things.

Both are about equal on supported operating systems, though some will fair better than others.

2 members found this post helpful.

Thanks, so I'll stick with Virtual Box.

gargamel