ubuntu virtualization options when no HW virt support?

Liam Proven lproven at gmail.com
Sun Jun 27 15:12:25 UTC 2010


On 27 June 2010 14:44, Loïc Grenié <loic.grenie at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2010/6/27 Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com>:
> [snip]
>> KVM just uses hardware virtualisation to run VMs on x86-64 CPUs with
>> Intel VT or AMD-V. This is relatively easy, but the programmers needed
>> a whole set of code to create & manage VMs. They took this code from
>> QEMU since it was right there & FOSS.
>
>    KVM is independent of x86-64.

Yes, it is, true, but are there any 32-bit only x86 CPUs which have
Intel VT or AMD-V?

> [snip]
>> Summary: if you want to run arbitrary PC OSs under desktop Linux, your
>> choices are:
>>  - FOSS VirtualBox (free, in Ubuntu repos, limited)
>>  - full Virtualbox (freeware, Ubuntu packages available on website)
>>  - VMware Player (freeware, Ubuntu packages available on website, limited)
>>
>> Or pay for VMware Workstation.
>>
>> If you want to virtualise servers, or on a server, and thus don't
>> really care too much about friendly GUIs, your options are:
>>  - Xen (FOSS - needs h/w virt'n to run arbitrary OS)
>>  - KVM (FOSS - needs h/w virt'n to run at all)
>>  - VMware Server (closed source freeware, needs no h/w virt'n)
>
>    Just curious: why do you make KVM a "server" solution ?

To be honest, I have never even looked at it - I do not own, nor ever
have owned, a PC with a virtualisation-capable CPU. I was under the
impression that it did not have a GUI or anything, nor did it support
features like guest additions, shared mouse pointers or clipboards,
disk or file sharing between guest and host etc.

Given that there are free solutions that do all this, it would seem to
me to be something aimed at places where such functionality is not
important. That is, servers, mainly. That is the only place and role
where I have heard of people running it, as far as I can remember.

-- 
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