Archive for the ‘virtualization’ Category

virtualbox vs …

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

These past few weeks I had to reinstall my main server. I decided to use Fedora 8. My server is used mainly as a file server and a place where I can run virtual machines. Originally I had used Xen on Fedora 7. That was a nightmare. I got it working on an early kernel, then it broke for a number of kernel releases and finally it was working again. It just was not a good experience. I am used to VMware and there stuff just works — at least for me :-) .

On to Fedora 8 … I thought I would use KVM. Again it did not work out the box. I ended up having to fix things, etc. Again, not the greatest experience. I am not a guy who likes messing around with his systems. I just want them to work. Not have to spend hours fixing them. So, I was just going to go get VMware Server. But, before that, I thought, let me go checkout VirtualBox. I had used it before and was impressed then. I run VirtualBox and it works. Nothing special, just worked. The other thing about VirtualBox is it is fast. While I was running KVM, I felt that the windows UI that I was running as my guest OS was just sluggish. But, VirtualBox is fast. I am very impressed and am going to use it for a while.

But, this brings us to the state of the open source virtualization tools that the distros are producing (maybe that is not fair, because I only tried FC8, so lets at least say what Fedora Team is producing/releasing) are just not up to snuff. Note I said tools and not the virtualization technology itself. I should try Ubuntu because of it’s superior user experience, maybe later…. But as of right now, the comercial products that I have worked with, VMware Client and VirtualBox, are just much better. In the end, I don’t care how the virtualization is being done, just that it works.