[HLUG] Virtualbox vs KVM Virtualisation

[Matthew Macdonald-Wallace]

Quoting Julian Robbins <joolsr1 at googlemail.com>:

> Hi
>
> I've been using VirtualBox for some desktop and server virtualisation tasks.
>
> Its ok, it's fast enough easy to use, but I've been caught out a couple of
> times with a bug relating to corrupting virtualdisks if you delete some
> snapshots, and odd problems where the virtualised server would go back to a
> point in December if the host server had to be rebooted. All quite annoying.
> Plus Virtualbox doesn't have a full web admin as yet, so you have to go
> where the server is physically located to admin it. Perhaps the most
> annoying thing is that it runs as an application, where if you close the app
> it will stop the virtual servers running within.
>
> For these reasons I'm contemplating using KVM instead. But I dont know much
> about it. I've read many good things about it, but would like to hear from
> anyone of their experiences of using Virtualbox, KVM or other virtualisation
> applications ie Xen. I've used VMware and don't really want to go that path,
> I'd prefer to use an open source solution if I can.

I'll bring my MacBook to the meeting on Wednesday.  I've got KVM and  
convirture running natively on the hardware and it works really nicely!

The main thing to bear in mind is that if you're using OpenVZ or  
VMWare server, the virtualisation is done in software, if you're using  
KVM, XEN or VMware ESXi then the virtualisation is performed on  
Hardware and therefore you need the chipset to handle it.

Kind regards,

Matt
-- 
Matthew Macdonald-Wallace
matthew at truthisfreedom.org.uk
http://www.truthisfreedom.org.uk/