I used to use virtualbox for all my testing purposes. Current machine runs Windows 7 64bit for work. Considering even switching to Linux for my work machine in the near future (did so for about 2 years in duration about 8 years ago).

For the past month or so, virtualbox fails to open any machines, new or previously created. I was patient with the developers to fix this error but apparently it has been persistent for quite some time. It is a "failed to open session" terminated unexpectedly with exit code 1 (0x1) error. E_FAIL (0x80004005)

If anyone has a clue as to how to fix that, I'd be happy to give it a go. I've already done the search and uninstall window's update thing, as well as uninstalling and reinstalling to no avail.

I'm also very open to learning about alternatives that you may use to virtualize machines.

I love gnome-boxes -- it's a nice, friendly graphical front-end for QEMU that will offer KVM compatibility and thus greater performance than virtualbox.

For the best results, set up QEMU manually from the command line or look into Xen hypervisors.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Qemu
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xen

Very interesting. I've never heard of these before.

Thank you very much for also providing some links for me to research and read up on.

Kvm using SPICE is the best I think, I have used all of the hypervisors and Kvm is far the most reliable and great on performance

+1 for qemu, always my choice.

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I don't like gnome-boxes, and prefer KVM (with spice).

Could you please explain why you prefer KVM & spice?

Well, Boxes is completely different than KVM. Boxes is a stateless virt tool, and KVM is an enterprise virtualization platform. Boxes is comparable to VMWare Desktop, while KVM is more like the old VMWare Infrastructure. Boxes hides all of the infrastructure, KVM allows you to make the changes and customize the network and storage and whatnot.

When I started using Boxes, I had lots and lots of crashes (it is a gnome project, afterall). That was what convinced me to just bail on it for KVM.


While Boxes is small and compact, KVM is so simple to install and use, and gives you many advantages in flexibility over Boxes. So it is larger, does more, is much more stable in my experience

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I really appreciate you giving me some additional information and explanation on this as these are new options to me.

What resources would you recommend as a good starting point for KVM?

You're welcome. Here is the project homepage: http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Main_Page

You should be able to find all he info you need, there. There is a big howto section for you.