Re: [gentoo-user] A helping hand with virtual machines, please.

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:43:10 -0500
Michael Mol <mikemol@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 2:20 PM, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:
> > Hi, Gentoo.
> >
> > A friend of mine recently suggested I should install and play with
> > virtual machines on my Gentoo.
> >
> > I've scanned /usr/portage for likely looking packages, particularly
> > in directory "virtual", yet found nothing likely looking.
> >
> > Would somebody please give me some hints which packages I should be
> > looking at, and perhaps any use flags I might need.
> 
> I've heard you should stay away from virtualbox, due to instability
> from their kernel modules.

I use virtualbox and it's the one I recommend.

The kernel modules are no better and no worse than any other
out-of-tree modules. Yes, they break sometimes. So does VMWare. So did
ath network cards long ago - that's how life works.

Here it runs on stable with zero issues about kernel versions for 6
months+, it's probably reasonable to assume that bleeding edge kernels
would of course not build occasionally. But does one really want to run
VMs on the latest bleeding edge kernel? I don't.

What I like about VBox is that you get all the useful bits in the
open-source version. With VMWare you get player for free but need
paying version to get more functionality.

It's been a long time since I payed with Xen so I can't really comment
on that product.

qemu-kvm would appeal to the hard-core geek, something that Alan Mac is
at least in part


> 
> Apart from that, make sure your kernel has kvm support enabled.
> 
> From there, you can either try playing with Xen (I've got my Gentoo
> desktop as my dom0), libvirt, qemu-kvm or vmware-workstation. I
> haven't tried any of the latter three on Gentoo, and I haven't tried
> vmware on Linux at *all*.
> 
> I can't make a good recommendation for which would suit you best.
> Perhaps someone else could make a suggestion or two.
> 



-- 
Alan McKinnnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com