Virtualization Product of the Year
 

What is your VM of choice?

--jeremy

KVM. I always wonder why some people uses anything else :^), especially commercial ones.

I'm using VirtualBox and quite satisfied with it. I gave up on VMWare when it became incompatible with Firefox.

VMware for the ease of use.
Virtual box coz' it's free. Still no match for VMware.

@PrinceSharma
VirtualBox "base" is free, but not the rest.
Beware of Oracle products - you should be very very careful with them. History shows that they will drop support for something if not remunerative enough or that they will at least build strong dependencies if it is.
And please don't understand me wrong. All companies are like that of course, but Oracle is in my opinion above the average.
(and btw. I liked VBx a lot when I tried it, but dropped it in favour of kvm because of doubts about the future and missing USB passthrough support. More or less the same with Xen, where I don't know exactly Oracle's involvement but I know that Oracle has at least a very strong position)

Virtualbox does it for me.

The kvm or qemu choise is confusing (with kvm being the accelerator for qemu) ...

Should "qemu-kvm" users vote for qemu or kvm ?

Virtualbox just rocks

I have been using VirtualBox, and it's OK. But I'm switching to qemu-kvm, because it's more versatile, can emulate more architectures.

vmware esploded on me,qemu denied me,virtual box ended up winning

VMWare Fusion on the Mac takes VMWare for Windows and knocks spots off it.

Awesome product.

I installed Virtualbox on my wife's laptop just to see if it helped but I'll refrain from using it on my own. Enough that I have a dualboot with LMDE and hackintosh on a laptop.

I vote for KVM, since I am only interested in using Linux in a virtual environment.

VirtualBox

KVM or XEN may perform better than VirtualBox, but VB is just the best, because combining easy of use, performance, easy of installation, it is just the best.

Guillermo Garron
http://www.go2linux.org

Virtualbox - simply because I've used nothing else yet.

vmware

No doubt.. Virtual BOx

VirtualBox for 2010. I suspect I will answer differently for 2011 picks.

Same here, haven't tried other VMs but VirtualBox. For me, it just works™.

VMware - they are the 900lb Gorilla in the Enterprise Market. Which is better than MS ;)

You will only know what type of people are reading this forum, rather than knowing what people really use. I can see that there's really not a lot of people vouching for Xen, simply because that's not the type of product you will use on the desktop. Yet, Xen is used by the vast majority of providers. In fact, even Virtuozzo has more users, but it's not in the poll because it's just a jail, not a full virtualization env.

So, like many polls on the internet, we shouldn't care too much about the result, but care about people's comments more.

Personally, as a web host, we use extensively Xen (we have nearly 100 servers running it). It's a wonderful product which is rock solid. But the goal is really different from the one you will have running Virtualbox or VMWare. It's really server oriented, and it doesn't really have a good desktop interface.

On the desktop side, I think that Virtualbox is a winner. If you have the chance to have VT support on your computer, and if you run an NVidia board with decent OpenGL support, then running an emulated Windows will be extra fast, even when using 3D (virtualbox translates D3D calls into OpenGL). Also, the GUI is really simple and everyone should be able to use it.

Now, as for KVM, it's a product which is already going to be dead. Yes, it's better than Xen on the desktop, but Virtualbox is more easy to use. No, it's not a replacement for Xen on the server side, because it doesn't have the needed features (like PV, mounting a *partition* and not a full HDD, and so on).

There was a big big buzz about RedHat dropping support for Xen in the favor of KVM. But at the end, this was only silly marketing from silly people. No, RedHat isn't Linux. And if everyone was saying that KVM was in Linux and not Xen, since 2.6.37, this is wrong. In fact, this has always been wrong: Xen has always been slowly up-streaming to kernel.org. Now, in a couple of Linux releases, we'll see the back-end drivers for Xen being upstream too, and we will be able to say that Xen is fully supported. Now, everybody will wonder: how exactly RedHat will advertize about not willing to support Xen anymore, when it's included in the upstream kernel? What will be the stupid reason they will push? That it's too hard to package the userland tools as a RPM, when it's already provided by xen.org? This makes no sense anymore, and they already look really stupid commercials marketing-oriented press-release that have zero understanding on the underlying technical involvements.

At the end of the day, everyone should be extremely happy that there's both KVM and Xen out there, and that they are COMPETING products. Overall, this is improving things, especially when one considers that Linus is only accepting one patch for one needed feature: at the end of the day, we got best of both worlds inside kernels from kernel.org.

Thomas

Thomasgplhost -

Thank you for some very interesting - and insightful - comments.

Sincerely .. PSM

VirtualBox
 

VirtualBox is not the most versatile, yet it's easy to use.

Virtualbox. Seems much faster than KVM (for Windows at least)

I like VMware Workstation. It is amazing and easy to use.

Have any one used stackVM ?

I'm using Xen. :P

Would Proxmox fit into this category? I had problems choosing between KVM and OpenVZ when I voted, because I use both under the Proxmox umbrella.
Just thinking out loud...

Proxmox doesn't appear to be a Virtualization Product in and of itself, it simply implements other Virtualization products, so would not be eligible for this category.

--jeremy

Virtualbox. I tried the proprietary version when I needed to work with an iPhone, but normally I use the OSE, since for some reason it will do fullscreen on the monitor I pick; the proprietary version always went to the primary monitor.

I've tried KVM with I think Virt-Manager (from Fedora), but couldn't get it to work properly.

KVM

jeremy forgot about lxc
 

It's the virtualisation's new kid on the block
That is what impressed me last year

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Linux_Containers

I use kvm so i voted
also i start to get rid of virtualbox and use only kvm

We made a decision not to include container solutions (such as Virtuozzo and LXC) in this category, but we're open to feedback on the topic.

--jeremy

VirtualBox / Xen
 

I voted for VirtualBox, as this is a poll for the 2010 prods of the year.

VirtualBox is certainly a darling, and I really like it a lot.

Xen, however, is (I think) where things are going to need to go for serious environments hosted in the datacenter.

Hope that helps :)

.

VMware is the winner IMO - I really like ESXi

As zVM isn't present in the list I won't vote :}

virtualbox was the first thing i used.. and it certainly does the job for me.. i mean.. i need to boot into windows? no problem>virtualbox .. though is there anything that will let the virtual machine take control over like 75% of my processor? i mean , linux doesn't even use that much while windows screams of pain in the amount it has.

also i use virtualbox to make myself an idea about the distro before making an usb out of it (did you know usb flash drives also have a life span ?? LOL)

I use both, VMware and KVM. Both are great, but there are situations in that one of them is better or just easier to use.
I started with QEMU, switched then to VirtualBox but I stopped using it, when something didn't work and I couldn't compile it. If I remember correctly, there were some incompatibilities. Some libs were just too new and VirtualBox required some older ones.

However, since I needed a program for virtualization (for testing purposes) and I had some problems with KVM, I tried VMware for the first time and I was amazed how easy it is and how great it works.

This doesn't mean VirtualBox is bad, it's just a program I don't want to work with. :/

Have you tried giving the VM more than one virtual processor core? You can do that by going into your VM settings->System; under the Processor tab, there's a slider there for setting how many virtual CPU cores to assign to the VM.

Sorry for accidentally voting for VirtualBox; apparently I like AQEMU and KVM better. Especially since VirtualBox could be killed by Oracle at any moment.

KVM rocks

I think virtual box is the best

Virtual Box

ok thanks i tried but i get it now i see my intel t5750 doesn't have virtualization support.. too bad thanks anyway,...

as for the ontopic..

why would oracle buy virtual box and then destroy it??

VirtualBox version 4 was a complete memory hog on my machine, and when I asked about it on the forum I got a sh!tty response from the mod taking the p!ss out of my hardware, which was perfectly adequate for the very same guest machines when running VBox 3.


So I switched to VMWare, and so glad I did, it's so much better, and a nicer community too (just). Big bad red lost another customer.

^ I can claim the same situation happened with me too, not the community but the software itself.

Linux-VServer rocks!

IMHO Citrix Xenserver would have deserved to be a separate choice. It's more than 'just Xen', but from the choices presented I vote for Xen.

VMware. Have not experienced others much