Which virtualization software should I choose

Paul Vriens paul.vriens.wine at gmail.com
Thu Jun 11 11:09:01 CDT 2009


On 06/11/2009 02:58 PM, David Gerard wrote:
> 2009/6/11 Michael Stefaniuc<mstefani at redhat.com>:
>> Paul Vriens wrote:
>
>>> I need to run several Windows versions (95 up to Vista for now) for our
>>> winetest and I really like the snapshot possibilities of VMware.
>>> Suggestions, recommendations?
>
>> I'm using KVM/Qemu with libvirt aka virt-manager. I have problems with WinNT
>> and NetBSD; those hang/crash during the install. Win2k3, FreeBSD and
>> OpenSolaris work just fine and I didn't try anything else yet. But I'm on F9
>> and once I have a little spare time I'll move to F11. I'll test it there
>> (never qemu) if that fixes WinNT.
>
>
> Since you're asking on the Wine list ...

I'm using VMware only for running winetest on Windows, so there is some 
relevance.

>
> VirtualBox does okay for Windows and Linux, barely for FreeBSD with
> lots of caveats and not really for anything else. Notably, OpenBSD
> doesn't work and the VirtualBox developers admit it but consider the
> bug beneath their attention. It's really not a very well-written
> virtualisation app.
>
> VMWare is reputedly better - it's the oldest common VM software and
> its emulation is very seasoned, well-tested and robust.

I've been a happy user of VMware Workstation from the very start but it 
always annoyed me that they don't support Fedora.

>
> QEMU *without* KVM works well, if slowly - it's almost a complete "red
> pill" for the guest OS. With KVM, OpenBSD is known not to work
> entirely properly.
>
> (OpenBSD is a bit of a torture test for virtual machines. It's very
> wary and cautious about what it runs on, and will happily segfault at
> a perceived hardware problem rather than risk letting a program access
> memory it shouldn't. Theo de Raadt says about a third of all problem
> traces come from VMs.)
>
> For testing Wine in other OSes, bugs found in a VM should always,
> always be confirmed on a physical machine, with the OS running on the
> bare metal - there are too many "glitches in the Matrix" in almost any
> VM software to be sure a bug is real.

That's basically true for most applications. Most vendors have these 
caveats in there support contracts.

Maybe I just revert to F10 for now and wait till VMware can properly 
install/run on F11 (It's mostly issues with compilation and dealing with 
newer kernel versions, 2.6.29/30). F11 doesn't do OSS (by default) 
anymore which means no out-of-the-box sound in VMware Workstation 6.5.2

The problem with both VirtualBox and QEMU/KVM seems to be supporting 
older Windows versions as guests (< NT4).

-- 
Cheers,

Paul.



More information about the wine-devel mailing list