VMware vs VirtualBox vs QEMU?

[FoolsGold]

Only ever tried VMWare. Not a legit copy, but then again my XP wasn't either, so...

Then again I am trying to become more legit, so I'll probably try something like VirtualBox from the responses here.

[Bloodfen Razormaw]

Personally, I've experienced significant performance increases with VirtualBox as compared to VMWare, so I've let go of VMWare in favor of VBox. Plus, it's small, simple, and doing pretty well on features considering their recent startup.

So for me, VBox wins out.

You gave reasons for choosing it over VMware, but not QEMU. Given that QEMU provides a more mature virtualization package, is supported in the default kernel release with KVM, with a richer feature set and better performance without proprietary restrictions, why choose VirtualBox over QEMU?

[starfry]

I've used VirtualBox and VMWare Player.
I use VMWare Player to run my native XP install in a VM when booted into Ubuntu. I can still choose to boot my XP natively too, so it gives me the best of both worlds.
I hae used VirtualBox to run a trial of VIsta and also to try and get a seamless Ubuntu/XP destop working (as per this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=433359). While VirtualBox works, I can't get the seamless thing to work as expected, but that is another story.
VMWare Player can use a real hard disk in a VM, allowing you to boot your native XP in a VM. You can't do this with VirtualBox.
I find my VMWare Player system to be slow. Maybe this is because I have loads of things installed on that XP. Time will tell as I play more - I've just started to evaluate this stuff.
I think the VirtualBox interface, with its RDP facility is great, but it is too early to make a choice as to which is best. Right now, they each have there advantages for me.
I have not used QEmu.

[jiminycricket]

I also like Virtualbox because it's easy to install and the interface is the same on Windows and Linux hosts, but I don't think Qemu's slow anymore if you install the newly GPL'd kqemu accelerator (kqemu-common I think) in Feisty and Gutsy universe.

[SlCKB0Y]

Try using it in a production environment and see if it is still fast enough. Home users don't need fast virtualization. On the other hand, virtualization is very important to businesses (which are the primary target for virtual machine software) and VirtualBox is not nearly fast enough for a production environment. It is much slower than QEMU, and a mile behind VMware.

Got some benchmarks for us to see? I'm really curious to get at least a somewhat objective speed comparison between all these virtual machines. From the way you are speaking I am sure you would have done some study or have something to back up your claims. I'd be really interested to see these.

[kaamos]

Since it was missing from the poll, I'll just answer here.. KVM all the way!

[DarkOx]

Given that QEMU provides a more mature virtualization package, is supported in the default kernel release with KVM, with a richer feature set and better performance without proprietary restrictions, why choose VirtualBox over QEMU?

I can't speak for the other fellow, but the reason why I chose VirtualBox over QEMU is that KVM only offers better performance if your computer supports it. My computer runs windows in VirtualBox just fine, but there's a noticeable performance decrease using QEMU, since I can't use KVM.

[maniacmusician]

You gave reasons for choosing it over VMware, but not QEMU. Given that QEMU provides a more mature virtualization package, is supported in the default kernel release with KVM, with a richer feature set and better performance without proprietary restrictions, why choose VirtualBox over QEMU?

I haven't tried QEMU. From the impression that I got by watching people talk about it, it seems to be a bit of a hassle to set up properly. Also, VirtualBox is, in part, based on QEMU. They do share some code. I'll be honest though; I don't know much about QEMU/KVM. I don't know what kind of a featureset they posess, I don't know if they really do perform better, or anything like that. VirtualBox seems to offer me all the options that I need, and has reasonably performance. I may be inclined to switch if there are enough benefits, of course. But for now, my choice is based purely on convenience.

[MRiGnS]

http://www.linux-gamers.net/smartsec...x-vs-qemu.html

there are benchmarks for vb qemu and vmware.


virtualbox is btw based on qemu.

[VorDesigns]

VMWare came out of the box and into production years ago. Then when server and player came out free, off of the site and into production last year.
Simple to use most of the time, the VM appliances available for testing are great.
My only real complaint for VMWare is that there is no real support for running high end games on the guest OS.