First off thank you in advance for your support here. Wanted to point out that I’m new to linux, so please bare with me. If you do decide to help me out, please explain in plan english as I’m still trying understand the linux world.
Anyhow, it is extremely important to me that I am able to run windows within Linux here as I have some applications that only run in Windows. I do currently have my system to boot up in dual boot, but I hate having to restart my computer to get back into windows. Just annoying.
So after some research, I have come to find that the top three options to run windows on linux are :Virtualbox, VMWare and KVM. From my understanding, running KVM seems like the best option as its closer to the hardware, correct me if I’m wrong here. I’ll have a need to install Windows 7, Windows 10, and other linux distros. Recently, I installed Windows 7 through KVM, but is so choppy and lagging. Not sure if I need to make a configuration change here to make this work smoother or if its like this.
My question really is if one the options (Virtualbox, VMWare and KVM) is better than the other? What are ya’lls experience with this? I have read some online articles, but it seems like they are so old and dated back to 2012 to 2015. I’m sure these products have come a long way since then. Really trying to find the best option possible.
Your feedback and help would be greatly appreciated.
I’m one of those doing without Windows at all ( and have been since 2001 ), but I do use VMs through KVM, mostly for testing/trying linux distros. There are a couple of caveats though when running VMs, the most basic being the host machine. If you have f.e. an i3 with 4GB RAM, running Win7 natively will not be an issue, in a VM it indeed may be sluggish, since it has to share the RAM with the host. Also, videocard may play it’s role. Could you provide us with a bit more info on that side?
Hi
I just updated this old thread starter on how I’m running Windows/openSUSE and SLE as well via qemu and gpu passthrough on my desktop with some cheap Nvidia GPU’s…
KVM is an option more suited for business use, it’s rock solid and widely used and supported but the graphical libvirt tools are a tad less intuitive than some of the competition.
For personal use whether it’s as a hobbyist or serious use, Virtualbox is easy to use. By default, it doesn’t run as a system service, it’s invoked by the User. VMs are stored in a subdirectory of the User’s Home directory/sub-volume/partition aso can be accessed by the User without special permissions. If you don’t need to run VMs continuously when you’re not logged into your machine, Virtualbox is a recommended choice.
VMware is a company that sells proprietary products, but one product that is free is VMware Player. VMware Player can deploy a single VM if that is all you need, and is probably easiest to deploy Windows (as a Guest). If you have serious plans to deploy multiple networked machines using intuitive tools, VMware Workstation (about $200) is without peer.
Xen is another option you didn’t mention which is roughly the same as KVM in that you would likely use the same tools (libvirt’s vm manager and virt install) to create and manage VMs. Xen’s underlying hardware however is radically different compared to all others, so whatever you learn if Xen is your first learning experience cannot be applied without modification to using any other virtualization.
Although there can be tiny differences, for the most part all of today’s virtualization technologies use a Type 2 Hypervisor (except Xen which is a Type 1 hypervisor) so performance is nearly the same for any you choose, the main difference you’ll likely be interested in is any that have easier, more intuitive tools and deploy like an application and not as a system service.
Hi
The issue with virtualbox and any third party modules are kernel changes, especially with kernel updates on Tumbleweed. Sometimes there can be delays before a virtualbox release after a kernel update, just like nvidia etc… on the stable releases of openSUSE, sure.
That’s entirely related to decisions and issues when you use openSUSE packaging that the Maintainers have to deal with…;
As the User you should be shielded from any such problems and have a relatively uninterrupted experience.
Unless you as the User for some reason might want to be your own Maintainer and install Virtualbox from the Oracle Virtualbox website.
In that case, you’d be pretty much on your own which depending on circumstances can be good or bad.
I don’t know that VMware Player has had such issues, or at least unknown issues…
Aside from periodically needing to use a different version gcc, there have been very few other issues over the years.
Who should use openSUSE Leap instead of Tumbleweed?
While every effort is made to build them, at this point there is no guarantee to have all additional modules available in openSUSE Tumbleweed like for example, Vmware or Virtualbox.
KVM for personal use isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just a bit less polished and its default setup may be a bit more “Enterprise”
But I’m sure if you can figure things out without problems, you may never miss the conveniences built into Virtualbox and VMware Player.
Maybe,
One day in the future you might be interested in deploying VBox or VMware Player and see what you missed…
There is even no problem in installing multiple virtualization side by side, but you have to be careful to not actively run them simultaneously… and that can mean shutting down services that start up automatically on boot (which would be the case with KVM).
but not a guarantee…