Am 28.06.2010 08:19, schrieb waltd...@waltdnes.org: > I have a 4-core Intel i3 (/proc/cpuinfo dump below) running 64 bit > Gentoo. I want to try hosting 32-bit Gentoo and also OS/2 Warp 4 on it. > What are people's experiences with different VM environments? Google > searching turns up a lot of out-of-date blogs/wikis. My CPU... > > model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU 530 @ 2.93GHz
I use vmware-server and also kvm for VMs. Both work. vmware: I don't really like the web-gui, it sometimes is buggy and unreliable, has ssl-issues and you need a specific firefox-plugin to access the console of the VMs. It brings its own tomcat-server etc., somehow not as minimalistic as we gentoo-users like things ... I also don't like the need to always log into that gui as I am single-user here anyway. Might be some small hack in PAM or so, never researched that. Aside from these issues vmware runs fine, and I like the fact that I am able to connect 2 very similar USB-serial-converters to one VM, something that KVM is not yet able to support AFAIK (I need them for my Suunto heart-rate-monitor and GPS, both cables have the same USB-id ...). This is the main reason why I haven't yet fully migrated my own VMs to ... KVM: It feels (and is) faster. Less overhead. I really appreciate the fact that it is in the kernel, you just enable it once and it is there ... Very little overhead, VMs feel fast and snappy. For gui I use virt-manager on top of libvirt, nice feature to have all your VMs at hand in one small gnome-applet ... (it should be possible to also control vmware-servers with libvirt, but this has been unreliable for me). I like the virtio-drivers for block- and network-devices. Fast and direct. The network-setup for kvm is somewhat more complicated at first, all that bridging and qtap and stuff, vmware does hide that more from you or somehow makes it easier to administer (my experience ... it is very likely that I don't know things ...). - In general both systems work fine, I use vmware out of historical reasons (KVM wasn't there or as ready when I started using VMs) and KVM as it seems to grow up and become a really powerful and open alternative. In fact it is already ... Stefan
