Most Popular Virtualization

[mark_smith]

Hey Guys, I was wondering, if you could suggest when to use KVM virtualization, Xen and VMWare. Which one do you think is the most popular among the various virtualization offerings in the market. Appreciate your help folks. Thanks.

[Rubberman]

Personally, I prefer VirtualBox to Xen and VMWare. I don't like Xen because the proprietary nVidia video drivers don't work with it and I use my nVidia 8800GT graphics card extensively. KVM and VBox are both open sourced, whereas VMWare is strictly proprietary, even though I use the proprietary version of VBox for personal reasons. I've been using it for 2 years without any serious problems at all.

[nujinini]

Hi!

I started using VirtualBox last month and have found it to be a very nice tool. Easy to install, operate and troubleshoot.

[cmiket]

Virtual Box does work well. I am currently running fedora 12 with a virtual Windows XP machine on virtual box. I have also ran Windows with a linux virtual box. Have not had any problems with it.

[VitalkaDrug]

I use various virtualisation system depending on my tasks:

1. OpenVZ
OpenVZ is the best solution for Linux system virtualisation on my desktop and servers. I use OpenVZ for:
- testing software configuration (mail, http, ftp, sql daemons)
- isolation various network services for security and easy maintenance reasons
- Linux software development
Advantages: OpenVZ has a very small overhead and memory usage. I can run 5-6 VPS (Virtual Private Servers) with Apache, Exim and MySQL simultaneously on my notebook (Celeron 550 2GHz/2 Gb RAM) without any loss of productivity by the host system. And this number is not limit!
Limitations: OpenVZ supports only Linux host and guest operation system.

2. VirtualBox
I use VirtualBox on my desktop for virtualisation various operation system. In most cases, Windows. Because many useful software run under Windows only.
Advantages: VirtualBox is very simple and crossplatform. I can run the same virtual machine under Windows or Linux host systems.
Limitations:
- more overhead and memory usage. I can start 2 virtual machines (Windows XP and FreeBSD, for example) simultaneously on my notebook and observe the loss of perfomance by host Linux system.
- no CPU per VM limitations support

3. VMWare ESXi
I use VMWare ESXI on specialized server platforms (Sun, HP) for virtualisation any operation systems - Linux, Windows, FreeBSD. The main goals:
- isolation various network services for security and easy maintenance reasons
- optimizing expensive and powerful hardware usage
- system software development
Advantages: very powerful and stable virtualisation software with zero price, the most flexible.
Limitations:
- spesialized hardware requirements with hardware virtualisation support
- no IDE HDD support