Virtualisation on non vmx/svm CPU

[Onno Benschop]

Hiya,

After banging my head against a brick wall for some weeks waiting for a
VMware kernel module and not wanting to roll my own, I've come to the
realisation that while VMware is a nice solution, it's not supported
enough within Ubuntu for me to roll it out any longer.

Since the Ubuntu preferred solution is kvm, I thought I'd try my hand at
installing/trialling/deploying that.

Using the instructions at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KVM is a
great start, but I come unstuck at "How to check if your CPU supports
hardware virtualisation"

Suffice to say that it doesn't. Yes, I could buy new hardware and that
is an option for future deployments, but not for existing installations.

There are cryptic references to kqemu scattered through the 'net and the
package description for kvm provides hints as well, but it then goes on
to recommend that you don't use kvm, but rather use qemu. I've seen
references to kvm using kqemu to "speed things up", but I'm hazy on the
details.

I've read about virtualbox and several other solutions, but I'd rather
not tread down yet another dead end to then be told "Well, you should
have chosen kvm."

So, as a current VMware user, wanting to deploy and test virtual
machines both in my Ubuntu development environment and with clients
running ubuntu-server, what are my options, what will be properly
supported and what can I expect when a new kernel update comes along?

I'm sure this is documented somewhere, but I've been unable to locate
something that solves this in the Ubuntu way, rather than start with
instructions like:

   1. Download the source tar ball from xyz.com
   2. Install the dev packages
   3. ./configure && make && sudo make install
   4. Profit!

If I wanted to do that, then I might as well run Gentoo - not a
preferred approach.

In case you're wondering, I'm also not interested in solutions that
start with:

   1. Change your sources.list to include xyz.com
   2. apt-get update, apt-get install magic
   3. Profit!


It is possible that Ubuntu does not yet include what I'm seeking, but
the way soren tells it, virtualisation is everywhere :)


Cheers,

-- 
Onno Benschop

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