[SOLVED] Recommendation for Linux virtual host

ceantuco · 03-07-2017, 05:46 PM

Hi All,

I have recently deleted my W$ndows partition and installed Xubuntu on my Lenovo Lenovo-B40-80 i3 250ssd and 16gb of ram. I would like to install a virtual host on Xubuntu to run a version of W$ndows. I have read that Virtual Box is good but a bit slow.

Please advise.

Best Regards,

wpeckham · 03-07-2017, 06:17 PM

Sure. What would you like advice about? Have you a question?

I have used VirtualBox, and if you have fast enough iron and enough resources it is fast enough. If not, nothing is going to be a LOT better.

VMWARE can do a LITTLE better, but only the paid products do enough better to be more useful. VMWARE is a bit harder to manage than VirtualBox, but not enough to rule either out. I have heard that XEN and KVM can also do the job, but I have not tried them myself.

syg00 · 03-07-2017, 06:28 PM

I'm not a big user of virtual, but have recently tried to get an old XP I want to keep running under Hyper-V on Win10 and KVM on Fedora 25. Ran much better on the latter although less than half the machine (a 6 year old laptop in fact).
I have used VBox in the past too, and it did fine for my modest needs (no 3D graphics, no heavy loads).

Try and see - easy enough to uninstall everything and try something else.

ceantuco · 03-07-2017, 06:58 PM

wpeckham: well, advice choosing a good Linux VM host. Yeah, I found that the VMplayer pro is about $150.. I have tried XEN and KVM before but I had a few issues running slow. Thank you for your reply.

Syg00: Thank you for your reply. I will give Virtual box and KVM a go. I will be running Windows 10 therefore, since the O/S must be activated I wanted to avoid activating the copy twice. (One on VirtualBox and the other one on KVM.) I'll give it a try. Thank you!

syg00 · 03-07-2017, 07:12 PM

With XP I didn't give it network access - so it couldn't activate. It complained about the change in hardware, and had a 3 day grace period. This was an image I had carved from a real XP install - M$oft tool; disk2vhd. I don't know about fresh install, but same idea should work to give you an idea of how it might run. If no good, simply delete and no-one is the wiser.

ceantuco · 03-07-2017, 07:14 PM

thank you!

ceantuco · 03-08-2017, 10:47 AM

I installed Virtual Box and created a Windows 10 guest. It is working fine. I noticed a little bit of lag when for example, my host O/S locks due to time out then I login and click on the running VM. after a few seconds it becomes responsive again.
I could def live with this lag.

Thank you all for your responses.