Alternatives to VirtualBox?
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VirtualBox is ridiculously simple to set up and get virtual machines going. Shared folders, shared clipboard and much more are no issue.
But.
It eats resources. The installed virtual machines (VM) run relatively slow. What have you found to be feature comparable - and most importantly more resource-efficient - alternatives for running VMs under Linux?
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Under Linux, the recommended route is KVM/Qemu, with Virt-Manager as the GUI front-end for them. You will need to follow tutorials to install it correctly, as it requires special steps, e.g. adding them to specific usergroups. But once it works, it works well.
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You can also run VirtualBox with KVM as a backend.
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Vagrant by Hashicorp.
Edit: if the news of IBM acquiring them goes through, I will cry. And we live in the worst timeline, so it'll happen.
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While it wasn't a requirement, be aware that Vagrant (along with all Hashicorp products) are no longer free software and are instead under the Business Software Licence.
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works decently enough for me is https://virt-manager.org/ to deal with libvirt. its not quite as nice in some ways but way less resource intensive.
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I agree. The only feature where I'd say it's weaker feature-wise is it doesn't have any form of virtual GPU acceleration - either you deal with software rendering or have to pass through a graphics card (I've done it, but it's not easy.).
Otherwise, I'd say it tends to run better than VirtualBox, though it's been years since I last used Vbox anyhow. A plus is Virt Manager comes in most distro repos, whereas VirtualBox doesn't. Also, it allows you to directly edit the XML, so you can do some cool stuff that would be really annoying (not impossible) to do in VirtualBox.
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Surprised no one is saying Xen
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Definitely if you're on Linux, use Qemu (and the best is to install a GUI to use it after)
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You can specify the virtualization engine in VirtualBox, including KVM.
A couple of easy virtualization tools that allow you to create VMs in a few clicks are Gnome Boxes and QuickEmu, which leverages Qemu and KVM
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Thanks for the tip!
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L [email protected] shared this topic
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I use Quickemu for mine, makes it really quick and easy to get a new system up and running.
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Using virt-manager, never tried quickemu
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Really wish we could get in the habit of recommending GUIs first, not last.
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Might be that you really don't need VMs but just lightweight namespace containers. If so, you can use docker/podman, systemd-nspawn or various other tools. The overhead compared to bare metal will be less than 1%.
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Without any kind of software behind GUI this is almost useless and I think that CLI (or even TUI) are today so underrated that we should give more and more power to them instead of GUI
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Really wish we wouldn't have to separate the two. This adds a complication layer for editing Windows users.
Ideally: install app (insert name). Run and enjoy.
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I've looked at it. It comes up a lot. Thank you.
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Good tip. Thanks.
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Not for the faint of heart, but I'll keep it in mind.
