KVM vs XEN vs VMware

[Liam Proven]

On 03/05/07, Tomoki Taniguchi <tomoki.taniguchi at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am curious about which of the the following virtualization options
> people recommend under Feisty?
> 1) KVM
> 2) XEN
> 3) VMware
>
> Please take into account I will be running this on a laptop with 1.5GB of RAM.
> Primary use will be to run WinXP
> I may want to use it to test other OSs (linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD)
>
> Is it possible to access and use peripherals which the host OS
> does not support?

Depends up to a point on your hardware.

KVM will only work if you have a CPU which supports virtualisation in
hardware: either Intel's VT or AMD's equivalent.

If you do have this, Xen can virtualise anything. If you don't, Xen
can only paravirtualise suitably-coded OSs, which basically means only
certain supported FOSS OSs.

VMware can virtualise anything, regardless of CPU type. Use this if
you don't have a CPU with hardware virtualisation.

-- 
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