Ah well, I’ve used Virtualbox, Vmware and KVM and I found them all useful for my purposes. Vmware is very slick and has an edge on easy Gfx acceleration for Windows guests but since they’re now owned by Broadcom that might become a problem.
I’m happy with Virtualbox on my desktop and KVM on a few servers. I don’t really care to take sides.
It’s really just Debian with more packages preinstalled, but yeah, the idea is that you have an OS that has the primary purpose of virtualizing other machines.
A bare metal OS is an OS running outside of a hypervisor. Virt-manager is a class 1 hypervisor that allows you to host guest operating systems. ( Run vms )
Technically no, both use kvm virtualization which is included in the Linux kernal, so both are “bare metal hypervisors” other wise know as class 1 hypervisors. Distinctions can be confusing 😂
TL;DR: use what is in the kernel, without strange out of tree kernel modules like for VirtualBox, and use KVM, i.e. on fedora virt-manager qemu qemu-kvm
Virtual manager is a application that connects to libvirtd in the back end. Think of it as a web browser or file manager for VMs.
Proxmox VE is an entire OS built for virtualization on dedicated servers. It also has support for clusters and live VM migrations between hosts. It is in essence a server OS designed to run in a data center (or homelab) of some kind. If is sort of equivalent to vSphere but they charge you per CPU socket for enterprise support and stability
Well this thread clearly established that I neither have technical knowledge and I don’t pay attention to spelling…
Jokes aside this is a good explanation. I have seen admins using vSphere and it kind of makes sense. I’m just starting to scratch the surface of homelab, and now started out with a raspberry pie. My dream is a full fledged self sustaining homelab.
What kind of headaches are you having? I’ve been running two completely different machines in a cluster with a pi as a Qdevice to keep quorum and it’s been incredibly stable for years.
OpenZFS is not GPL compatible so it can never be baked into the kernel in the same way BTRFS can. I’ve run into issues where I’ve needed to downgrade the kernel but if I do the system won’t boot.
Btrfs also doesn’t need any special software to work as it is completely native and baked in.
Is there an equivalent or something similar to “Use host i/o cache” that VirtualBox have? Last time I tried virt-manager the install time of the vm was incredibly slow because of the terrible write speed to my hdd. Vbox fixes that issue with the host i/o cache setting.
Usually setting the cache mode to “none” gives the best performance, assuming you’re using the virtio interface, instead of SATA/SCSI. This is a common mistake most newbies make when installing Windows, because virt-manager defaults to the latter, which gives poor perfomance. The same goes for the network btw, you’d want to use the virtio network interface instead of the emulated NIC. So before you install a Windows guest, make sure you change both those interfaces.
After changing the hardware interfaces, what you’d need to do (with Windows guests) is you’d need to supply the [virtio drivers](github.com/virtio-win/…/README.md, which you’ll need to provided to the Windows setup (via the virtio driver ISO) when prompted.
But if you’ve already installed Windows, you’ll need to install all the virtio drivers first and then update the interfaces after you’ve powered off the VM.
And in case you were wondering, this isn’t an issue with Linux guests, since virt-manager defaults to virtio hardware, and drivers aren’t an issue either.
Add comment