Virtualisation on non vmx/svm CPU

[James Dinkel]

On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 4:15 AM, Onno Benschop <onno at itmaze.com.au> wrote:
> 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?
>

Yes, KVM is definitely the choice if your processor provides the
virtualization extentions.  If not, qemu is the way to go.  Kqemu is
an accelerator for qemu, so essentially a recommendation for kqemu and
qemu is the same thing (although you can use qemu without kqemu, but I
don't know why you would).

Here are some documents to help you out:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UserDocumentation?action=fullsearch&context=180&value=qemu&titlesearch=Titles

Another nice thing about qemu is KVM actually uses the qemu userspace
tools to manage virtual machines, so once you learn the commands for
qemu, you already know the commands for KVM.  They are also both
manageable through libvirt and any tools that use libvirt.

James