Any recommendations for virtualization solution?
 

At work we've been struggling for a couple weeks already to find a decent solution. We have a pretty solid AMD cpu, 32gb RAM, 2x HDD 500GB each.

We've tried Proxmox, Xen..something (can't recall, my colleague was responsible for installation), today he installed Virtualbox on Ubuntu 16.04. And every time there's some issue - something with Kernel not properly supporting AMD (Proxmox), USBs unavailable to be mapped to guests, now it's again something with versions not being compatible.

What do you guys use? We would have 2 users creating, snapshotting, deleting, creating again 5-6VMs at all times (Win mostly), and 2 more users logging in infrequently to their virtual machines which have to run without disruptions. Our budget cannot exceed a few hundred Euros per year. Preferably no costs at all, at least not for a couple months now. Must have an ability to map USBs from host machine to virtual, preferably from guest machine to virtual.

Or are we overthinking it and we just choose whatever and stick to it and solve the potential issues within a few weeks?

Virtualbox 5, hands down, for me on a desktop system.
8G of RAM here seems to allow me to fire up 3 to 4 VMs without too much ill-effect.
I'd let "users" creating these VMs handle and install the guests, off their desktops.

RAM is inexpensive.

If 64bit guests are needed, 64 bit host must be installed.

My USB seems to be functional here but as I went to "test" is, I see I'm not part of
the vboxusers group, oops, don't see that either on Vbox5. I guess users is it.

Ovirt with kvm works for me. Few thousand machines on it now, with SAN storage, 10G ethernet,. the works. It was not easy to set up because of the nic partitioning, but aside from that it runs well and doesn't have a "huge" learning curve if you are familiar enough with linux in general and RHEL/Centos and kvm.

+1 for me.

Make your user account you login under, a member of vboxusers group for USB to work inside VM's.

I like virt-manager w/ qemu/kvm for myself. I got tired of the issues I kept having with vbox, the networking was flaky for me, and at the time, I couldn't get USB access to host usb devices working. Because I also prefer the fullscreen functionality of virt-manager over vbox, I've never attempted to go back to test newer versions of vbox to see if they were working better (I would guess the answer is yes from other posters).

The oracle product (Virtualbox) has a very nice interface and is very easy to use. If you're having problems with it and you're not a Linux person, you can post questions on the board and expert users like Habitual will try to help you.

KVM/Qemu while that's my default choice as well, it's graphical interface (virt-manager/ovirt et al) isn't comparable to the VirtualBox solution. It's a stable, light and robust virtualization solution however it's an enterprise platform so it's definitely geared towards more advanced users and is much more difficult for new users to get from "I'd like a VM" to "I got a working VM".
VirtualBox has many of the capabilities of it's enterprise counterpart, just scaled down and simplified. It is also the only laptop virtualization product I've ever gotten a windows server to boot on (but that could just be me).

As it has always been, until recently (re-installed OS), but today I didn't see any
vboxusers group as I expected to, so I made one, added my self to it and logout and back in.
No soup for me!

I suppose I'll need a partition type Windows will recognize.
Guest additions are 1 for 1 the correct major minor and micro versions.

And depending on how it was installed and from where, it may not just be me or the OP.

Gremlins.

I am aware of Virtualbox, qemu (kvm), xen ,vmware.

In my opinion:
Virtualbox is great for single users.
Xen and vmware are great for companies (vmware maybe more successful than xen).
qemu/kvm is a bit between the two.

I was thinking myself about potentially moving my VMs from Xen to Qemu but ultimately qemu still gives me a bit the impression of being a bit too "detached" from the handling of the VMs... (I don't like a lot that additional layer of libvirt).

Yeah, I got caught out like that (not adding my user account to the vboxusers group) and the USB done the whole of nothing in the VM.