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What software do you use for virtualization on Debian and why?

Asked by [ Editor ] , Edited by Fernando C. Estrada [ Admin ]

For example, if I want to test a ARM platform I use qemu because it is a processor emulator. I use VirtualBox for ISOs because that works for me. 


What do you use?
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fugit
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This is not the place for an answer. :)

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14 answers

5

angus

I use VirtualBox for windows XP, Varied linux distros, BSD’s etc,  on a Debian Squeeze x64 host (have also used it on a Windows Vista 64 and a Windows 7 64 host)


Its easy to install (has a repo), guest add-ons for just about everything (for shared folders etc), easy to setup, doesn’t seem to have any comparability issues and is faster/just as fast as KVM/VMware in the benchmarks I have found, as well as in my own experience.

Its also free ;)
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3

fcestrada [ Admin ]

+1 for virtualbox-ose because is very user friendly, but I don’t feel right using virtualbox-guest-additions as a non-free dependency so maybe I will try KVM.

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janc
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The virtualbox-ose-guest-* set of packages is free.

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3

evgeni [ Editor ]

For myself (and my work) I use qemu/kvm. It is very flexible, I can fully control it via command line and it has a built-in VNC server (at work, we have a box running a bunch of Windows VMs, and we connect via VNC to it for testing).


If someone would ask me “I’m new to Linux, what should I use for virtualization?” I’d answer VirtualBox (OSE), as it is easier to setup for a newbie (fully GUI supported etc) and the installation is just an apt-get away. :)
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2

lethalman [ Editor ]

I also use VirtualBox since I’ve seen it being used by my friends and it’s quite simple. I’ve also used QEMU (with kernel support obviously) to quickly run a Debian Live installation.

Another great thing about QEMU is that I’ve used command line programs of powerpc, sparc, etc. directly on my host terminal without running any target OS! Ok that is not much of virtualization, but it’s a lot useful for developers to test portability of applications without installing foreign OSes.
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0

anarcat [ Editor ]

We are using Xen and linux-vserver on our servers. Xen is for isolated and resource-limited environments where we want to guarantee certain resources. Linux-vservers is for hordes of small servers (e.g. nameservers) that we don’t mind competing for resources. Both are well supported in Debian stable and have a wide support community.

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0

richs-lxh [ Editor ]

At work we use Kvm on Debian Lenny servers. As we provide Virtual services to clients we need speed and stability. Kvm is the latest technology that IMHO is far superior to Xen, Vmware etc.


At home, for personal use, I use Virtualbox. It’s easy to setup, and runs every OS I have tested, including Bsd, Linux, Windows. It is also rumoured to be able to run older versions of Mac as well.
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0

r murphy [ Editor ]

For my rented server I’m using OpenVZ with a Lenny host and etch/lenny/squeeze virtual servers for different tasks, e.g. one for database, one for standard web services, one for webmail which seem to be notoriously insecure – squirellmail anyone ;)). The overhead is much less then for other things like Xen and you can do all the work remotely with ssh – no need for facny GUIs ;)

At work we use KVM a lot, but should use it more often, as we often run out of physical hardware.

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0

peter.sabaini

Virtualbox for desktop virtualization, ie. for running MS Windows or running untrusted guests, or plain testing

Linux-VServer and OpenVZ to isolate lots of server applications. It’s incredibly useful to be able to run dozens of VServers on even modest hardware!

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0

fugit

 
Currently I use virtualbox and openvz. 
I use virtualbox on my laptop for emulating other OSes specifically windows. 

On servers I use openvz for any linux visualization. The main reason for using openvz is it has very low overhead and allows the use of different distributions. Openvz create virtual environments utilizing a single kernel to keep overhead down. 
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0

hadret [ Moderator ]

At work, on my company laptop, I’m using KVM + rdesktop. I need to run Windows XP in it and these two give me the fastest solution out there. Also at my company I have some VMware hosted machines and I must admit, that ESXi is pretty neat tool. At home I’m using KVM (:

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0

beibos [ Editor ]

I´m using kvm at work and home. With virt-manager and virsh via libvirt it`s really easy to handle your machines. Under lenny you should use the newer packages from backports!

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0

red onion [ Editor ]

KVM for full virtualisation – controlled with libvirt. 

LXC for server isolation though the management tools are not that mature.  Wrote my own startup/shutdown scripts as the current commands are a bit brutal.  lxc-stop for example does just that – equivalent to pulling the power on a real machine.

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0

scientes

virt-manager hands down, which primarily uses qemu-kvm underneath. If I am doing ARM, its generally in a chroot with qemu-user-static, and not in a virtual machine, cause that is alot easier to work with.

kvm is the only virtualization platform which doesn’t have driver issues. Also: it supports NESTED virtualization on AMD and Intel chips, which is pretty insane.

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