Guide: www.christitus.com/vm-setup-in-linux Debian T-Shirt: www.bonfire.com/there-is-only-one/ Want my custom VMDK (VM Files)? Check out these Downloads that come with them! - ArchTitus - www.christitus.com/arch-titus - MacOS Linux - www.christitus.com/linux-macos
@@sfasr32t432tfg43etfg It may be terrible but it's dam beautiful for those of us who were NOT born in the white privileged class of programmers. Not all of us are aviators!!!
@@kylehill3643 Wow, those identiy marxists incorrectly identified as educators at your k12 school really did a number on you. I hope you can manage to recover from that brainwashing and wish you well.
@@sfasr32t432tfg43etfg I hope you get a kick in the head for advocating all these shortages so your little rich corporate jungle survives and we don't!
Sure it's slow but if it wasn't for Virtual Box on Windows 10 I would have never gotten into Linux. It allowed me to experiment in a safe, virtualized environment.
I find hyper-v on Windows better because like qemu it's a full kernel level type 1 hypervisor which integrates and shares hardware rather than emulates hardware with tools like a software based type 2 such as virtualbox and VMware workstation. I can run 8 virtual machines within seconds and not hit 💯 CPU with qemu and hyper-v as a result. Linux mint, FreeBSD, and Ubuntu even kernel level hyper-v drivers built in
Virtual box is fantastic! It’s not fast but for 99% of people being easy to use and requiring minimal prior knowledge makes it spot on. It has lost its edge a little now VMware is pretty much free. I do agree with you on the one point though. Getting a bare metal Hypervisor is the way to go. I use an old Cisco C220M3 with ESXi on and its great.
For linux-based hosts, yes, QEMU is better. For Windows-based hosts, it's still Virtual Box. Also, if you are looking to automate virtual machines spinning out using Vagrant, Virtual box is most compatible than any other virtualization system. Only Vagrant + Virtual Box combination lets you spin up a machine with additional custom volumes, for example.
@@DeadPool-hd9np I don't like Hyper-V. I run a virtual network with a PFsense VM and linux VMs behind that. I can do that easily in Virtual Box. I could not for the life of me figure out how to do that in Hyper-V. Not saying it isn't doable, I just couldn't make it work.
If you've got a supported system. A lot of the best bits of VirtualBox are only available if you use the proprietary extensions, which is to say that the open source edition will run on systems that lack the ability to use USB and other features that should be included.
no it's great for using in general, not just starting out, sure you can't play 3d games but same is true with KVM as well unless you have another GPU to do full passthrough with, virtmanager also doesn't offer nearly as many options as virtualbox does, so if you want to change things like vram amount or vgpu type, you have to change the xml config which is really annoying and wonky with virtmanager. virtualbox also adaptively offloads work to consume less cpu cycles if the guest system isn't doing much work, which is more useful for end users with home PC's, it makes your host system more efficient while the VM is in the background, you can also explicitly set the util limit of the amount of cores you allocate to the system as well, with KVM you cannot, KVM was more meant for servers utilizing the full capabilities of the CPU for virtualization, which is great, but may be not as good for a resource limited end user pc. i'm not knocking kvm/qemu, it's amazing, but saying that virutalbox is inferior to it is like comparing apples and oranges.
Tried VirtualBox on Windows about three times and could never get it to work for more than about the first boot. Subsequently would just not boot or would hang. Tried Hyper-V. That was a disaster. Then tried VMWare Player. “Just works.” Good enough for my purposes. Just wanted to learn blockchain dev. I’d also previously tried WSL2 but that would inevitably break down at a certain point with obscure errors.
KVM is a type 1 hypervisor, while Virtualbox is a type 2 hypervisor. The KVM hypervisor is part of the kernel. A type 2 hypervisor is also referred to as paravirtualization since it's not true virtualization. A huge benefit of KVM based virtual machines is that you can run them alongside the host OS and use the desktop of the host at the same time, just as you can when using a type 2 hypervisor such as VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation. With other type 1 virtualization such as ESXi and Proxmox, the entire machine is basically dedicated to the hypervisor and you are then managing it from a second device through web browser or other web based interface.
I love virtualbox. I agree the performance could be better, but it's really easy and fast to start up, it makes testing something in my windows machine quite a breeze. Less hassle and just works.
The only real issue I have with virtual box is it had/has issues with sharing USB ports, and there’s no real way to access a video card’s full performance inside a VM. I have a 1050 and a 3060 and it’d be nice to map one to a virtual box for whatever. Then again, for most other purposes.. VirtualBox seems fine…
you really do not known what you're missing... it's painful just to read this statement lol. Like you've just wasted his clip... and that was at least double the speed if not triple, and that is with gui. you could assign shortcut keys and boom it's there.. or press ctrl+x NameHere001 press enter...
I've always used VirtualBox just to quickly check out a distro or do some experiments. I've not yet had the need for the power that Qemu offers, but when I do - I got your guide to follow. Thanks again, Chris!
I always check distros using the live image, never did a virtual machine run because I want to see how the distro works with MY hardware, not a virtualized one
@@reinaldofernandez That's useful for checking hardware compatibility, yes. When that is not a factor and I'm checking out the other parts of a distro or desktop environment, VM is just fine.
I use both. I've had some times where QEMU just straight up refused to work, whereas VirtualBox worked just fine. Opposite is true, too. I've gotta admit, though, QEMU is actually more performant than VB when it works.
I use both. QEMU/KVM is preferable from a performance perspective, but - as you point out - VirtualBox is available on all platforms (the real issue as far as I'm concerned is lackluster VM support on Macs). As machines get more performant, VirtualBox's deficiencies fade somewhat.
@@Karter315 KVM is the kernel virtual machine technology that manages the CPU virtual extensions. QEMU leverages KVM. libvirt and virsh etc. is what provides the UI, at least on Linux where I'm using it.
For a quick install and run, Gnome Boxes is a great VM manager. Sure, not a lot of options there, but for a distro testing it's such a great plug and play experience.
Virt-manager and GNOME Boxes runs the exact same KVM/QEMU technology. The only difference is that Virt-manager is much harder to setup and allows you to edit a few more things via the GUI, which you have to edit the xml for if you want the same on Boxes. They both run the exact same engine under the hood. Boxes just automates everything necessary for 99% of use cases and makes setup much smoother. Example: No need to create a bridge for the network on Boxes.
@@BenderdickCumbersnatch Exactly. I really hope they improve Boxes more so that some options can be adjusted via GUI more easily. For example hardware acceleration is many times disabled for some reason and I really don't like to go into xml to change it. ^^'
No word of a lie when this video notification popped up I was currently trying to troubleshoot a VM in Virtualbox that was performing terribly.... I took this video as a sign of fate ;)
virtualbox has never really performed "terribly" for me under a good config, did you make sure to give it at least 2 cores and 80mb of video ram? if you just leave it default it will perform terribly because it'ill only use a tiny percentage of your resources.
I installed QEMU. Clicked Start, then went to All Programs and launched QEMU. Nothing happened. Did some chores around the house and came back. Still nothing. Came back to it today and checked. Nothing, nada. Uninstalled and clicked VirtualBox and my good old UI opened and ran my virtual Windows 7 and everything worked perfectly. This was the first video that I was disappointed with the product, not Chris or the video. I'm sure someone out there knows how to use only the mouse to make this work. BTW, I'm an old Amiga user and don't believe the keyboard should exist. If this requires some use of the keyboard then I'm out. Still giving a thumbs up for the video! Thanks, Chris.
I used VB when I taught high school. The ability to create snapshots was invaluable to how I was designing labs for my IT and Cyber courses. I love QEMU and VMWare for my personal machines, but I am a Linux guy normally anyway!
As a Linux guy, you may wish to run your VMs on Btrfs and enable real filesystem snapshots and clones. Vbox was extremely great back in the days, but the more pure Linux technologies are better these days.
@@jeschinstad I was not talking about Btrfs (it wasn't even a reply to your reply tbh), I was talking about the snapshots in QEMU/KVM available via virt-manager, which apparently does not like snapshotting UEFI VMs
I find Virtualbox to have a niche in using some older OSes. Say I want to pop up XP for a legacy program, it's generally going to be a better experience for me on Virtualbox than qemu. Or if I need to set up a VM I can guarantee is going to be easy for a group to use cross platform.
I have heard the same argument for VMware player/workstation. They have lots of emulation of ancient machine hardware so they are probably better for ancient OS.
VirtualBox is nice when sharing a dev environment with multi-os dev group. VirtualBox runs on Win/Mac/Linux so same image and config can be used on all and changes synced on dev repo.
I'm a VirtualBox user and I'm open to other options. QEMU is a faster solution, but given what you showed in the setup process, you're configuring the base Linux OS to support running the virtual machine (which is fine). I run VirtualBox only when I need to run Windows for something. I'm not sure I want a virtual machine service running when I'm not using any virtual machines. In other words, VirutalBox is an "on demand" virtual machine application I use only when I need it. I have Windows 7 and Windows 10 setup in VirtualBox and I haven't run Windows 10 in close to a month, now, and I haven't run Windows 7 even longer than that. I won't argue VirtualBox is "better" but I'll contend it's a different approach to running a virtual machine. Thanks for posting the video!
Not every use of VM needs Boot Isolated cpu cores. I run 1cpu 2.7ram vm with 4gpu crypto miner, so I dont mind isolating that single core on boot.. I still game with other 7 cores on host. I could run On Demand instead, but I would run shared 2core VM in that case, and it would be bigger impact on gaming
Libvirtd can be disabled and then only run when you want to use the VM, if you want to do things that way. But there's no real risk in leaving libvirtd running in the background. I've run my systems that way for at least the past 12 years- started out running it that way on an i3 with 4G of RAM and it didn't really cause any performance issues when not running the VM.
I saw the same thing in another video - a line was added in terminal set it to startup as default. Wasn't sure if there was another way to do it or not.
@@joshuapk9808 thought someone else commented on another video that having it on would slow VIrtualBox down - if you have both VMs on the same machine.
I think the implication is that, by extension, it's faster in every other area as well (I'm not too sure, as I haven't used passthrough-less virtualization in ages, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is). But besides that, there are SO many more tweaks and customizations you can do to make it significantly faster, that is simply missing from VirtualBox entirely. GPU-passthrough is an obvious example, and it's easily a better, safer alternative to dual-booting.
With different distro/OS, the boot time does not matter as long as the performance during normal usage is the same. He is testing with the same distro -- slower boot time means slower in everything else especially those with heavy disk usage.
Qemu with KVM is what convinced me to switch over to Linux. If I need Windows, I just spin up a VM with everything I need passed through. Didn't have to reinstall Windows or backup its other drives, just passed 'em through. I even made the ultimate recovery USB so I never have to install an OS on metal ever again.
@@Schweppese and what is Linux using? iGPU? I looked up KVM in the past and every guide say that you will boot with your iGPU and pass through your video card to the VM. So I dropped the Idea, because my Mainboard doesn't have Display-Out. I would really appreciate it, if you can explain me again, or even send me a guide. Thanks :)
I'm on Arch, and I made the good switch. Qemu / Virt Manager was more or less straightforward to install, and works like a boss. And with better control over USB forwarding. I can now run iCue to control the LEDs of my chassis and fans without a hitch. I no longer need to do a dual-boot, and may just eventually blow away the Windows hard drive, adding another 2TB to Arch Linux! Thanks for this.
I find networking iin VirtualBox much easier, e.g. if I want to have a few VMs behind a router VM, I find the network set up much simpler. Individual VMs may be faster in KVM/QEMU but if you want to play with building a network behind a router VirtualBox is easy to manage.
That's a huge benefit of VirtualBox. It makes setting up a network accessible virtual machine WAY easier than QEMU (a couple mouse clicks, and you're done). I really want to like QEMU, but VirtualBox's network management is light years ahead of it (virt manager doesn't help accomplish this, either). To QEMU's credit, its network setup has improved tremendously in the last several years. Instead of being impossibly crappy, it has progressed to being just ridiculously crappy. It doesn't matter how much more performant QEMU supposedly is. If it won't let me easily setup network-accessible VM's, it has no performance at all. That's always been where my QEMU journey has ended, which is a shame. It's always been so close, yet so far away.
@@anthonyobryan3485 I'm curious what's so difficult with virt-manager setting up networks? When you are configuring a new VM, when you add the NIC to the VM you just set it as a bridge to the host's network adapter. Assuming there's a DHCP server, the VM will grab an IP on the host's network and you're all set. (Or you can configure a static IP but since we're talking about ease of use here, DHCP is easier.)
@@joshuapk9808 OK. I just tried again using the virbr0 device and it's working. (For those playing at home,) I selected Network source: Bridge device, Device name: virbr0, and Device model: virtio. I tried all sorts of combinations before and couldn't get it going. I am wondering though if it was due to some conflict between KVM/Qemu and VirtualBox because I think I'd been running a VBox VM in the desktop session prior to trying out a virt-manager VM. I've noticed that if I have VBox running I can't get a virt-manager VM running and vice versa. I think I have to just pick my poison and stick with it. I may have previously had virt-manager/KVM/Qemu mis-configured as I think I've fiddled with permissions since first experiencing trouble. Hey ho. This is why I love Linux. Always new things to find out.
Virt-manager networking sucks big time. I once managed to configure it in about 10h to do what virtualbox does by default: making de vm available from the network AND from the host via the same IP with a bridge.
I want to run Windows with basic graphics accerelation without passing through stuff, and Virtualbox is miles ahead of Qemu. Its VMSVGA graphics provides lot better graphics performance in WIndows guest compared to Qemu's spice or whatever. For Linux guests, Qemu is stellar with Virgl acceleration and is a no contest.
or linux too for that matter. Im trying to run Linux Mint on my Unraid server and its horrible slow without a dedicated/passthough gpu. I have an better experience with Linux Mint in VMBox under windows.
Virgl acceleration being stellar has sadly not been my experience so far. I never figured out why though. Under these circumstances, VirtualBox is the faster option for anything desktop sadly.
It's a type 2 software hypervisor. It's crap due to it's architecture as your CPU is using hardware emulation for alot of stuff. A type 1 kernel level like qemu and even Microsofts hyper-v can all share your hardware with little performance hit in comparison. Another nice feature is you can put your computer to sleep as your vms all share kernel level stuff with your host. There are also less bugs as a result of this as stuff is shared and integrated
@@AP-rc4dg update your virgl, I had a friend with a bad experience on his card and it turned out to be a bug in virgl, he reported it and I'm pretty sure they are working on a patch now
@@cheeseisgud7311 Thx for letting me know. I have a 5500XT from AMD, so Navi 14 chipset. It performs decent in other areas under Linux. I also get direct rendering in VMs. But the performance is at around 23-25 fps max in glxgears, so not enough to match the refresh rate of the monitor. Hence dragging around windows is super sluggish. I stopped trying at some point, but I will try again in the coming days and see if anything changes when I run qemu from cli instead of Virt Manager. Is this update which fixed your friend's bug very recent?
Thanks for the setup video. I've been trying out Gnome boxes as well as QEMU to compare to the Vbox installs I usually use. Launch is faster, but overall performance of VBox seems pretty good once launch is done. The biggest hurdle for me in QEMU is dealing with shared folders. Very awkward compared to VBox GUI setup. I'm not a CLI guy, so it's tough. If there was something like Virt-Managers USB mounting GUI, that would be a great improvement.
Yes, you're right. However, most of the work can be done in virt-manager. You just need to set up a squashfs "filesystem" there. With 9p support in your host kernel, you can mount it with a single command. Probably there exist some other way to do it as well with libvirt/virt-manager.. Or maybe the developers of virt-manager didn't do the proper job of adding this function, not sure.
Used VirtualBox for the last 2.5-years, made the switch to QEMU about a month ago on my desktop and laptop. Need a Windows box to run Excel spreadsheets for work. The change over was straight forward. Definite performance benefits using QEMU. Cloning and backing up QEMU is very simple. Finding no reason to use Virtual Box going forward. I did lose my Windows OEM license when I made the switch, Windows picked up on the hardware change. Enjoying your videos again, thanks for all you do.
Yes, QEMU is the way to go for sure and it's a great way to host a hypervisor in a VM so you can run VMs on a VM on a host running QEMU. It may sound silly at first, but there's a lot of good use cases for doing this as well as making it a great way to do labs while you're learning about virtualization without needing a fleet of physical computers for it. Though you should make sure you have higher system specs for doing this. One use case I've had is deploying a VM to run GNS3 so I can virtualize network devices for doing modeling and learning labs. This meant all the network devices were running as VMs on the GNS3 VM on my Linux host running QEMU.
@@kempoutzzz Documenting all my tinkering like that is something I'm slowly putting together so I start an online blog site about it. My goal is to just get my own unique spin on how to put things together out there so that someone can learn some new trick, or at least what NOT to do when it doesn't work, and I do like documenting when things go wrong for some laughs. lol I'm still very far off from being able to launch it though. In the meantime, tools like GNS3 and Eve for simulating networks for learning and/or lab work are pretty well documented and there are videos online on how to set them up too.
For Windows 10 many people say there is no noticeable difference in performance between virtualbox and Qemu, but VirtualBox much easier to use.(boot up doesn't mean performance)
This is the first video of yours I have seen. My initial observations: @0:00 - Virtual Box, It is a terrible machine manager ... @5:06 - I'm not saying Virtual Box is terrible ... Make up your mind. Is it terrible is it not terrible? You cannot have it both ways. @5:35 regarding QEMU "It's very easy to set up once you know everything about it" That's a pretty true statement about lots of stuff. I have used Virtual Box a little. It worked fine for my needs. I have heard of QEMU but never used it. Would it be easy for me to set up not knowing anything about it? Given the number of subscribers and your "vast skill set" you must be an authority. Be authoritative here too.
Once I heard his first statement I knew that he is not the authority he pretends to be. I have used VirtualBox for many years on Windows, Mac and Linux with very few problems. None of them were related to performance. His main selling point here is the faster boot time and I couldn't care less if there are faster alternatives for booting (-but even that looks fishy as I have many virtual machines that boot much faster than his example so either the test is rigged/a poor configuration or other problem.) QEMU certainly has other advantages and there might be reasons why some people would prefer it over VB. Most users however will find VB good enough for their needs and from an objective stand point it is certainly not "terrible". Setting up QEMU is a nightmare when you do it the first time. VB is super easy and you are up and running in no time.
I used VirtualBox whilst studying because that’s what I first learnt to use. I came to love it (albeit didn’t really try anything else coz I was still learning it all) because of the detailed help available online and multi-platform ability, I figured out how to keep my VMs on an external SSD (rather than use what was at the time outdated study Windows computers with HDDs) and avoid exporting and re-importing a VM when I’d use it at home in the Mac (because I figured out the folder structure of the working files).
After watching your PulseAudio And Alsa video, I watched this one. I have used Virtualbox and Debian for years, I recently ditched Debian except for one old laptop. I'm now using ArchLinux on a PC and a couple laptops. This video has pointed me to look further into using QEMU/KVM on my ArchLinux machine. Thank you! Liked & Subscribed.
I'm all for qemu, especially when I want to passthrough my second gpu to the vm (windows/linux/*bsd). KVM + Qemu + io_uring + nvme storage is close to the barebone machine in I/O performance. I'm using the combination in EPYC server and VM can get 1-2 GB/s write performance with less than 5% CPU.
I just installed Qemu under Windows but was most disappointed to discover that it has no UI to help sort through the dozens of EXE files it comes with and installed no documentation on how to use it, despite that being checked off in the installer. I also couldn't find any answer to whether it requires and uses Hyper-V under the covers, which is a huge show stopper as Hyper-V pretty much breaks any of the third party VM based applications that I use every day. Not going to use Qemu if I can't figure out how to actually invoke and configure it as a persistent VM, so it can run from something other than an install CD image (as all the examples I could find online showed).
If you are building a server definitely go with the qemu stack. However, if you need for small tests I don't think it is that good. For example, try to forward a port from the host do the VM....
as with everything it depends on your individual needs at one situation VBox will outperform QEMU, in other QEMU will outperform VBox some strenghts of VBox are running legacy systems, and networking different virtual machines together
Hey Chris, Great video as always. I had a wierd thing happen. I loaded up virt-manager on my Debian bspwm (BigDebian) machine. It would take 20-30 seconds to start as a user but would start immediate using sudo. So, I took my other computer which is the same other than being in a desktop case vs a tower case. I loaded my typical minimal Debian install and went through my procedure. Then I loaded virt-manager. It works just fine. I've done a lot of messing around with different apps and some compiling as well on BigDebian. I figure that I messed up something in the process. So, I think I'm going to use LittleDebian to test this stuff out and spare my main machine (BigDebian). Sorry to hear that you got sick. Covid is a nasty piece of work. I know of three people in my circle that have gotten it in the last two months. Two ended up in the hospital. I am self isolated which has worked well for me since I'm basically a social introvert anyway. I pray you get well soon. Take care and Stay Safe.
That sounds really strange. However, general delays can sometimes be attributed to DNS issues. It has to connect to the Host when launching virt-manager and probably where this is going wrong. Check to see if you have yourhostname 127.0.0.1 in your /etc/hosts and research connecting to session host. Also you can try to launch your VM direct from terminal using the corresponding QEMU terminal command without a GUI frontend. I'd be curious to see if this has a delay. Also, check to see if you get delays when issuing virsh commands in terminal. Start with listings and status command to see what you get.
@@ChrisTitusTech Thank you for all of the suggestions. I took another tack and did the minimal install with bspwm. Then I installed virt-manager and it worked correctly. After loading the rest of the software, it again started misbehaving. So, one of the software packages is the cause of the problem. I'll find out which one tomorrow. That will bring me much closer to how and why. ;-)
I love the names of your PCs. I have Small One and Small Too, both running Debian, Redline, Rainbow, and GreenGlass which all run windows 10 pro. Naming computers is fun.
Thanks! this is perfect! I use Ubuntu now pretty much exclusively but still have a need for windows for a few apps.... and one of them needs the GPU (Reality Capture) and QEMU pass through solves the problem that Virtual Box couldn't handle. This was easy to setup, thanks!
Another option if you are into a GUI VM manager, especially for those on rpm based distros like Fedora, CentOS, Rocky, Alma, RHEL would be cockpit. But I rather prefer doing this stuff on the CLI with e.g. virt-install, qemu-img, and virtually almost everything with virsh. Last but not least vagrant is a great tool to kind of automate setting up your vm boxes.
2 ปีที่แล้ว
I wanted to switch to using qemu instead of virtualbox but didn't know about virt-manager. I usually use VMs for some quick testing of random things and just want to get a quick VM running without having to hassle with CLI commands. This will help me a lot! Great guide!
I think there is an error in the methodology of this test. What are the chances some of the performance is due to disk caching? The machine was first started with Virtualbox and he mentions both tests use the same virtual disk image, so the second run with KVM/QEMU would be faster due to IO caching. Any additional suggestions?
I've been using VritualBox around 10 years or so. I didn't bother learning or trying other software. Today I heavily rely on VM usage. VMware on my machine runs better Windows and Linux. QEMU is by far the best on Linux. Machines start instantly, snapshots are easy to make and you have bunch of settings that are easily editable.
What about bridging the VM's network with a wireless adapter? Virtualbox makes it so easy, but on QEMU/KVM its a pain. That is why I run VirtualBox on my laptops and QEMU/KVM on my desktops
Nice to see this video, because starting to use Quemu/KVM is just what I did. I still having a lot of VirtualBox VMs, although I migrated these to Linux as well (I am talking about the host OS), because on my W10 installation I wanted to start with WSL2, which badly interferes with virtualbox and causes it to crash. But Quemu, with kvm enabled, is much better in performance. And I really like it's simple setup with simply a shell script line base. The docs are a terrible mess though. Anything that you want to know is hard to find and everything you do not need to know is easy to find.
Two questions: 1) What's the QEMU experience like on a Windows host? You briefly touched on how that's not a great experience, but do you have a video about that? 2) What's the QEMU experience like if you are running on a Windows host, with a Windows guest? Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated. (I understand that you are showing a Debian-on-Debian example, but I'd be curious to see what the qemu experience is like if it was say Windows-on-Windows (WITHOUT Windows 10's WSL because I'm still running Windows 7.) Thanks.
The only problem I've encountered with QEMU is getting around some of the quirks involved with starting some games... there are still some titles (specifically FH4) that just won't start in the hypervisor. I'm sure there's probably something I can do to 'hide' that from Windows and make it 'think' it's running natively on metal, but I haven't had the time lately to figure that out. QEMU is definitely the virtualization tool for getting the most out of your hardware for VMs, though. Thanks for talking about it!!
Can't take videos like this serious. There's no need to put down virtual box unless you have an incentive for it. Just say you prefer something else and that you recommend this and keep it moving.
I always tried to make virtual machines and I just found up your video. It is really interesting to see what other softwares can do when we compare them to popular softwares.
First of all, I must say that I'm a really big fan of your Channel and of Your work in general That you're trying to make computing more accessible For the average user And that you Have made for yourself an objective to broaden up our Horizon Beyond the Windows Realm I'm a Linux newbie and I like it so far so much so that it has become my main operating system of choice for daily tasks on my dual boot system And since discovering Linux I barely boot back into windows however, regardless of how Linux is wonderful, you can't escape the fact that sometimes you have no choice but to resort back to Windows and for that purpose, I've tried a few virtualization platforms and I must say That I totally agree with you that out of the bunch of all the available virtualization platform virtualbox is the most inferior And since my favorite virtualization platform Which is VMware and I know it probably sounds sacrileges for the unwavering Linux user but I digress and although it's possible to install it through the Aur its implementation can be very flaky at least on Arch-based distros so I've resorted to KVM however now I'm considering deploying a standalone virtualization server so I would like to ask you did you had some experience with virtualization platforms such as proxmox and alike and if so I wonder maybe you could be able to make a brief introductory guide for beginners in proxmox however if not I will understand and yet I would like to ask you please get back to me and tell me what do you think of my idea
I’ve used VirtualBox for a long time and it works just fine, whether it’s for study labs or a Kali Linux vm for network scanning. If I really need great performance then I just put it on a real platform like VMWare or Hyper-v.
Hello Chris, for sure QEMU is much faster. But what about installing legacy OS such as Win Xp (if there is a need to use old software that works on older windows)? Vmware has vmware tools and VirtualBox has also guest OS tools. Does QEMU have something similar like drivers to support win xp on it?
The whole difference for me is that it just works. Virtual box never gave me any internet connection problems. Whereas kvm suddenly stopped working. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't and I just can't get behind why
One nice thing about Virtualbox is that the VM settings are stored with the disk images. So adding that VM in Virtualbox on another distro is trivial. KVM/Qemu isn't as easy I don't think (please let me know if I'm wrong). The VM XML config is in /etc/libvirt/qemu - can that file just be copied to the new distro? What about VMs with snapshots?
"it's free, it's on every operating system, it's easy to use. That's all it has going for it." Don't disrespect "easy to use". "Hard to use" usually subverts any on-paper good qualities of a hard to use system.
Thank you sir, with my freshly rebuilt laptop I will give this a try over VirtualBox. I have used both in the past and honestly never really even thought about performance. Again, thanks
For me, setting up sparse/grow as you use it type VHD is tad difficult with virt-manager. Other than that its absolutely breeze to use with no guest additions to be installed and upgraded from time to time.
I use virtualbox to run some windows only POS programs for managing my store. I would love to migrate to QEMU but what about guest additions that virtualbox provides, is there an alternative for that
I have to say, setting up storage in Qemu is confusing compared to Virtualbox....maybe this is just an experience issue but I would rather deal with slow performance the few times I need to access a VM than having to fight a GUI interface in Qemu. Why do I need to separate everything into "pools"? Can't I just tell it to apply the ISO to a given hard drive? I expect this is part of the functionality that makes Qemu so fast, but trying to install Windows 10 in a rush and I always just end up using VirtualBox
Im actually surprised to learn QEMU is faster, would be nice to see some more benchmarks beyond a bootup. Memory footprint, CPU utilization? What is QEMU doing to get this advantage over VirtualBox? Great video!
Chris, I have a lot (30) VBox machines (all distros of linux) on my Win10 system. Each one serves a different purpose and all I run on them is Firefox. This approach does a nice job of keeping snoops like Google and Facebook from seeing other sites I use for affiliate stuff. I don't really want to create a dual boot system, as over the many years I've used VMs, Win updates always messed up the boot sector and I have to fix it.
No lol. What the hell? And you got 15 up votes? KVM is a few kernel functions for activating hardware accelerated virtualization on the CPU and trapping i/o requests. QEMU is the engine that emulates the hardware such as the graphics, sound, motherboard, disk, etc. When the virtualize machine runs code on the CPU, and the code tries to access input/output, the KVM hypervisor traps it and sends the request to QEMU which handles the hardware emulation. QEMU and KVM are both required components. You cannot use one without the other. Virt-manager and GNOME Boxes are the GUIs for this stack.
If only virtual-manager had built in bridged nework. It doesn't. It will NAT a 192.168 but that's NOT bridging. You should be able to access the bridged VM from your local network but you can't. For instance, spin up a web server and try to access it from something other than the hosting machine and it's inaccessible. VirtualBox does do this, just put the NIC in bridge mode and you're done.
I rarely use VMs, but the last time i used it, qemu had no 3D acceleration, so it was a very sluggish UI experience. Virtualbox has working Directx acceleration on windows.
That's not entirely true ... I tried Windows 10 VM on an Ubuntu 20.04 distro, and I could not use my GPU ... I had 3D acceleration ON and I don't know if I did something wrong but I could not utilize my GPU... I even had the extras from VirtualBox installed...
@@andreas.karatzas It's supposed to work with older Windows and DirectX versions. But I tried to use it to play some XP games, to no avail. And last time I checked, it was even REMOVED from latest Virtualbox versions, I had to install an older one.
Good stuff. I haven't used VMs much recently, but I was one of the first to give the thumbs up for VirtualBox. Competition is always a good thing and we end up the winners!!
I can say 100 % for sure your config for Virtualbox is not identical to the kvm(qemu), if i use Virtualbox i get below 10 sec startups on all the linux distro i try, maybe check your settings.
I also get faster boot times than what the video shows across multiple Linux distros, but if you want to sell something, you should really overdo it. Personally i think the Virtualbox boot attempt is unjust vs QEMU, since its the first attempt that loads your data from your non-volatile to your volatile storage, and the second attempt takes advantake of this and the higher speeds.
Awesome video, thanks for your cocntent! I have several questions. 1. Can you compare the same but not using KVM, like if you use qemu for windows images, does it work faster? 2. Can you passthrough hardware in non KVM images, like video cards? Like for example if I want to use windows for playing modern games, can I use qemu and passthrough the Video card there and play from there? 3. Can I use qemu on windows, you mention the version is not so good, but does it have the same features as being able to passthrough hardware?
Thank you. This was the kick in the pants I needed to finally commit to moving away from VirtualBox. The difference in performance is, frankly, astonishing. My Windows VM finally doesn't feel sluggish, esp. on startup.
Hello Chris, Thank you for the wide variety of ideas you share. Wondering with Qemu, I know you're not fully involved in "Mac", but using Qemu as Hypervisor on macOS - may a video, or ideas to do it right in your realm? I'll appreciate any links, feedback, e.g. Have a great week!
No harm to use virtualbox in windows environment, plus, utilities like osboxes is make it easier to deploy and dispose. But, to balance it, learning qemu is really have good selling points in work resume. Thanks for sharing, friend.
Sorry Chris, but I do not agree. On my hostsystem VirtualBox is much faster, than QEMU with Virt-Manager. Starting a fresh installed Debian 11: Virt-Manager 33 s, VirtuslBox 22 s. Adding a bridge interface is in VirtualBox one click away, no frickeling on the linux host system. Scaling the Guest-Window is in VirtualBox much easier and smoother than in Virt-Manager.
One thing I like about VirtualBox is that your snapshots are hierarchical. It makes it easier to organize and switch between snapshots. One thing I like about QEMU is that you can close the display window without shutting down the VM client. It can remain running in the background.
I always used vagrant for quick setup of development boxes (Nowadays a lot transitioned to docker), and virtualbox as provider always seemed to work good enough :)
Frankly, I don't see the virtualizer as bad. I worked with pretty much everyone, including Qemu. from there to say that the virtualizer is bad there is a long way. Just because something better exists doesn't mean it's bad. I currently have it in my humble laboratory with hardware mounted inside the motherboard's own cardboard box, (I always wanted something like that) And I tell you that it's going strong. I have other lab kits but they are beasts compared to this one. Currently the limitation of this home lab is the 64 GB of ram that the hardware itself can mount. Quietly, I'm running about 11 Vms. They want to power a linux core + Qemu/kvm and then they tell me. Good video
QEMU can emulate a lot of hardware one doesn't have - it's on a completely different level. Current windows builds don't seem to support multi-processor in UEFI - this could be a firmware problem, though. I have crashed QEMU's vvfat driver many times. Doesn't appear to be a lot of Windows developers working on QEMU, tbh. VirtualBox usually just works in Windows. One problem I've had is trying to boot off a VISO in UEFI. It's nice to have such powerful tools.
On a Windows host, QEMU is WAY slower than VBox. I installed Windows 10 with both of them, QEMU had 5 CPU cores given to it, and VirtualBox 1 core. QEMU had more RAM given to it too. And I didn't even start the VirtualBox VM until QEMU was at the "Getting ready" installation part, giving QEMU a huge head-start. VirtualBox completed the installation before QEMU. I couldn't put acceleration on QEMU, so that may have had something to do with it. Before this, I was trying to make QEMU work for at least 4-5 hours, and this is the one where it finally worked. VirtualBox just worked without hassle. Also QEMU used around 65% CPU ON IDLE, and VBox around 5-10%, and I couldn't even use the QEMU VM because it was completely frozen.
If you are using windows there is no simple way to get QEMU (Unless you compile it yourself, which most people dont want to or dont want to do it), the link in the official site seems to be dead, i agree Virtual Box is slow, but if you are on windows you have the free version of VMWare. And if you are using linux yeah you can use QEMU, but that would be very little people compared to the amount it uses windows.
My build time went from yawning and watching paint dry to about 17 seconds. I'm a QEMU believer! Also you mention VB might be better for noobs but, if you don't mind running Ubuntu as your VM, you can get Multipass from canonical which is a fire-and-forget wrapper on top of QEMU, and it works on Linux, Windows, and macOS. Two 👍🏼👍🏼 for QEMU-based VM solutions!
At 5:05, Chris says that he's not saying Virtualbox isn't terrible, but his literal first words in this video was "Virtualbox. It is a terrible virtual machine manager."
If you just want to play around with different distributions, it's fine. But if you want to actually use the VM for anything meaningful, then KVM/QEMU is the proper way to do it.
Any chance for a guide on Arch Linux, or, will your guide work if I can figure out what dependencies from your Debian list? Thanks man, great video, was just looking for something like this after your livestream yesterday using QEMU!
It's something like this: sudo pacman -S qemu virt-manager virt-viewer dnsmasq vde2 bridge-utils openbsd-netcat edk2-ovmf ebtables iptables libosinfo (dmidecode). Ebtables vs iptables, I think ebtables is the recommended firewall. dmidecode is optional, can't remember what it does. Libosinfo lists the OSes when Virt-manager asks what OS the ISO contains. Very short list otherwise. I don't think Win10 is even on that default list. Then theres the permissions. To the image, if you run that from other harddisk (not from /var/libvirt or whatever it is). You need permissions to access it all the way. Not just the folder it is in, the whole tree structure. So Virt-manager can traverse there. I don't remember the command.
Hmm... Never had a problem with VirtualBox being that slow. A clean fresh install of Ubuntu or Fedora workstation 5 to 7 seconds. A fully tweeked out Ubuntu or Fedora server install running a Splunk indexer. Maybe 10 to 15 seconds or so. Not defending VBox in the least. But never had a VM take 30 plus seconds to load.
I don't know what his setup is, but I get into Linux using VirtualBox much faster than his system does. I installed the OS-dependent software that goes with VirtualBox. I forget what it's called now. Both Qemu and VirtualBox have different advantages. And, I'm not a noob. I've been writing software on multiple versions of Unix, on VMS, and on CPM, DOS, and Windows, and I've been programming for over forty years.
It's interesting that saving 20s on boot is somehow important now! My frustration with VB is guest additions, Ubuntu desktop and other distros just never feels right, display resolution is hit and miss - half the time I'm looking at a 640x480 black box in a white window on a 1080p screen. If I could just use a VM without the hassle then Linux would be my daily driver
Hi. I have had some problems with Qemu in the past but of course is because I didn''t have knowledge about it. I'll give another chance because I like it so much. Thanks
As the vbox may be slow, it is easier to use: - Guest additions help you transfer files - Doesn't need to everytime after close and open to change resolution. - Pre-installed GUI
I actually prefer VirtualBox over Qemu, and the way I've configured it, it outperforms qemu for me. But that is entirely the core problem, it really depends on what you need it to do, to make one faster than the other. I need it mainly as fileserver, and VirtualBox's .vdi outperforms qemu's vmdk. That said, you can now configure VirtualBox to choose which emulation type you want to use and you can set it to kvm and it will use kvm rather than virtualbox, so you can have 2 VM's run through VirtualBox where one actually runs using kvm with its performance and quirks. Yes, kvm also has its quirks.
Guide: www.christitus.com/vm-setup-in-linux
Debian T-Shirt: www.bonfire.com/there-is-only-one/
Want my custom VMDK (VM Files)? Check out these Downloads that come with them!
- ArchTitus - www.christitus.com/arch-titus
- MacOS Linux - www.christitus.com/linux-macos
It would be handy if you could include the commands for arch based distros and also for those poor souls using rpm based distros.
@@sfasr32t432tfg43etfg It may be terrible but it's dam beautiful for those of us who were NOT born in the white privileged class of programmers. Not all of us are aviators!!!
@@kylehill3643 Wow, those identiy marxists incorrectly identified as educators at your k12 school really did a number on you. I hope you can manage to recover from that brainwashing and wish you well.
@@sfasr32t432tfg43etfg I hope you get a kick in the head for advocating all these shortages so your little rich corporate jungle survives and we don't!
@@sfasr32t432tfg43etfg Buh Bye corporate bot!
Sure it's slow but if it wasn't for Virtual Box on Windows 10 I would have never gotten into Linux. It allowed me to experiment in a safe, virtualized environment.
I find hyper-v on Windows better because like qemu it's a full kernel level type 1 hypervisor which integrates and shares hardware rather than emulates hardware with tools like a software based type 2 such as virtualbox and VMware workstation. I can run 8 virtual machines within seconds and not hit 💯 CPU with qemu and hyper-v as a result. Linux mint, FreeBSD, and Ubuntu even kernel level hyper-v drivers built in
@Hilol1000, god point it allowed you to know Linux. Now you can let those huge and laggy tools behind and start doing VMs the right way.
i think hyper v doesn’t work in windows 10 home
Doesn't Vbox have several escape vulnerabilities?
True... 10years ago.
Now hyper V is the way to go for people want test VMs in Windows
Virtual box is fantastic! It’s not fast but for 99% of people being easy to use and requiring minimal prior knowledge makes it spot on. It has lost its edge a little now VMware is pretty much free. I do agree with you on the one point though. Getting a bare metal Hypervisor is the way to go. I use an old Cisco C220M3 with ESXi on and its great.
For linux-based hosts, yes, QEMU is better. For Windows-based hosts, it's still Virtual Box. Also, if you are looking to automate virtual machines spinning out using Vagrant, Virtual box is most compatible than any other virtualization system. Only Vagrant + Virtual Box combination lets you spin up a machine with additional custom volumes, for example.
Vmware
@@Random_PersonOfficialHyper-V
Virtual PC
VMWare is a way better
@@DeadPool-hd9np I don't like Hyper-V. I run a virtual network with a PFsense VM and linux VMs behind that. I can do that easily in Virtual Box. I could not for the life of me figure out how to do that in Hyper-V. Not saying it isn't doable, I just couldn't make it work.
Thank You! VirtualBox is good for starting out, but there are SO many performance issues. Great video Chris!
If you've got a supported system. A lot of the best bits of VirtualBox are only available if you use the proprietary extensions, which is to say that the open source edition will run on systems that lack the ability to use USB and other features that should be included.
Hey craft love your vids!
no it's great for using in general, not just starting out, sure you can't play 3d games but same is true with KVM as well unless you have another GPU to do full passthrough with, virtmanager also doesn't offer nearly as many options as virtualbox does, so if you want to change things like vram amount or vgpu type, you have to change the xml config which is really annoying and wonky with virtmanager.
virtualbox also adaptively offloads work to consume less cpu cycles if the guest system isn't doing much work, which is more useful for end users with home PC's, it makes your host system more efficient while the VM is in the background, you can also explicitly set the util limit of the amount of cores you allocate to the system as well, with KVM you cannot, KVM was more meant for servers utilizing the full capabilities of the CPU for virtualization, which is great, but may be not as good for a resource limited end user pc.
i'm not knocking kvm/qemu, it's amazing, but saying that virutalbox is inferior to it is like comparing apples and oranges.
no, qemu/kvm does not even support 3d rendering with nvidia cards.
Tried VirtualBox on Windows about three times and could never get it to work for more than about the first boot. Subsequently would just not boot or would hang. Tried Hyper-V. That was a disaster. Then tried VMWare Player. “Just works.” Good enough for my purposes. Just wanted to learn blockchain dev. I’d also previously tried WSL2 but that would inevitably break down at a certain point with obscure errors.
KVM is a type 1 hypervisor, while Virtualbox is a type 2 hypervisor. The KVM hypervisor is part of the kernel. A type 2 hypervisor is also referred to as paravirtualization since it's not true virtualization. A huge benefit of KVM based virtual machines is that you can run them alongside the host OS and use the desktop of the host at the same time, just as you can when using a type 2 hypervisor such as VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation. With other type 1 virtualization such as ESXi and Proxmox, the entire machine is basically dedicated to the hypervisor and you are then managing it from a second device through web browser or other web based interface.
I love virtualbox. I agree the performance could be better, but it's really easy and fast to start up, it makes testing something in my windows machine quite a breeze. Less hassle and just works.
@@theokkali467 that's what I got, so you're lying to yourself then? What a dumb logic.
The only real issue I have with virtual box is it had/has issues with sharing USB ports, and there’s no real way to access a video card’s full performance inside a VM. I have a 1050 and a 3060 and it’d be nice to map one to a virtual box for whatever.
Then again, for most other purposes.. VirtualBox seems fine…
you really do not known what you're missing... it's painful just to read this statement lol.
Like you've just wasted his clip... and that was at least double the speed if not triple, and that is with gui.
you could assign shortcut keys and boom it's there..
or press ctrl+x NameHere001 press enter...
Watched**
sorry I can not edit....
i think that vb is good for beginners but qemu i think is overall better
I've always used VirtualBox just to quickly check out a distro or do some experiments. I've not yet had the need for the power that Qemu offers, but when I do - I got your guide to follow. Thanks again, Chris!
No no! Uninstall QEMU! Reinstall Viltrualbox!
@@valledesertico why
I always check distros using the live image, never did a virtual machine run because I want to see how the distro works with MY hardware, not a virtualized one
@@reinaldofernandez That's useful for checking hardware compatibility, yes. When that is not a factor and I'm checking out the other parts of a distro or desktop environment, VM is just fine.
I use both. I've had some times where QEMU just straight up refused to work, whereas VirtualBox worked just fine. Opposite is true, too. I've gotta admit, though, QEMU is actually more performant than VB when it works.
QEMU+KVM will refuse to work if you're running VirtualBox, since VirtualBox will occupy the hardware virtualization.
I use both. QEMU/KVM is preferable from a performance perspective, but - as you point out - VirtualBox is available on all platforms (the real issue as far as I'm concerned is lackluster VM support on Macs). As machines get more performant, VirtualBox's deficiencies fade somewhat.
How do you feel about KVM vs QEMU? I'm trying to migrate from VMWare Pro.
@@Karter315 KVM is the kernel virtual machine technology that manages the CPU virtual extensions. QEMU leverages KVM. libvirt and virsh etc. is what provides the UI, at least on Linux where I'm using it.
I’d recommend trying to check out UTM. I’m not sure how performant it is, but it’s cool to check out
For a quick install and run, Gnome Boxes is a great VM manager. Sure, not a lot of options there, but for a distro testing it's such a great plug and play experience.
Virt-manager and GNOME Boxes runs the exact same KVM/QEMU technology. The only difference is that Virt-manager is much harder to setup and allows you to edit a few more things via the GUI, which you have to edit the xml for if you want the same on Boxes. They both run the exact same engine under the hood. Boxes just automates everything necessary for 99% of use cases and makes setup much smoother. Example: No need to create a bridge for the network on Boxes.
@@BenderdickCumbersnatch Exactly. I really hope they improve Boxes more so that some options can be adjusted via GUI more easily. For example hardware acceleration is many times disabled for some reason and I really don't like to go into xml to change it. ^^'
Yup Boxes is a different front to than virt-manager but still uses QEMU/KVM.
Yes. Gnome boxes is imo the best virtual and easiest virtual machine software out there.
Gnome boxes is really a gui front end for qemu
No word of a lie when this video notification popped up I was currently trying to troubleshoot a VM in Virtualbox that was performing terribly.... I took this video as a sign of fate ;)
virtualbox has never really performed "terribly" for me under a good config, did you make sure to give it at least 2 cores and 80mb of video ram? if you just leave it default it will perform terribly because it'ill only use a tiny percentage of your resources.
I installed QEMU. Clicked Start, then went to All Programs and launched QEMU. Nothing happened. Did some chores around the house and came back. Still nothing. Came back to it today and checked. Nothing, nada. Uninstalled and clicked VirtualBox and my good old UI opened and ran my virtual Windows 7 and everything worked perfectly.
This was the first video that I was disappointed with the product, not Chris or the video. I'm sure someone out there knows how to use only the mouse to make this work. BTW, I'm an old Amiga user and don't believe the keyboard should exist. If this requires some use of the keyboard then I'm out.
Still giving a thumbs up for the video! Thanks, Chris.
I used VB when I taught high school. The ability to create snapshots was invaluable to how I was designing labs for my IT and Cyber courses. I love QEMU and VMWare for my personal machines, but I am a Linux guy normally anyway!
As a Linux guy, you may wish to run your VMs on Btrfs and enable real filesystem snapshots and clones. Vbox was extremely great back in the days, but the more pure Linux technologies are better these days.
VM snapshots are pretty useful and they should work in QEMU/KVM via the shown virt-manager... unless the VM uses UEFI, then they don't work....
@@mini_bomba: What? Why would the filesystem care whether you use UEFI?
@@jeschinstad I was not talking about Btrfs (it wasn't even a reply to your reply tbh), I was talking about the snapshots in QEMU/KVM available via virt-manager, which apparently does not like snapshotting UEFI VMs
@@mini_bomba: Oh, I see. Interesting.
I find Virtualbox to have a niche in using some older OSes. Say I want to pop up XP for a legacy program, it's generally going to be a better experience for me on Virtualbox than qemu. Or if I need to set up a VM I can guarantee is going to be easy for a group to use cross platform.
I have heard the same argument for VMware player/workstation. They have lots of emulation of ancient machine hardware so they are probably better for ancient OS.
virt-manager does lots of paravirtualization by default. Pure qemu can also emulate lots of old hardware.
@@hermannpaschulke1583 Yeah, but you're not going to get the sort of extensions virtualbox and vmware have to improve QoL
Where can you find an xp iso these days?
VirtualBox is nice when sharing a dev environment with multi-os dev group. VirtualBox runs on Win/Mac/Linux so same image and config can be used on all and changes synced on dev repo.
I'm a VirtualBox user and I'm open to other options. QEMU is a faster solution, but given what you showed in the setup process, you're configuring the base Linux OS to support running the virtual machine (which is fine). I run VirtualBox only when I need to run Windows for something. I'm not sure I want a virtual machine service running when I'm not using any virtual machines. In other words, VirutalBox is an "on demand" virtual machine application I use only when I need it. I have Windows 7 and Windows 10 setup in VirtualBox and I haven't run Windows 10 in close to a month, now, and I haven't run Windows 7 even longer than that. I won't argue VirtualBox is "better" but I'll contend it's a different approach to running a virtual machine. Thanks for posting the video!
Not every use of VM needs Boot Isolated cpu cores.
I run 1cpu 2.7ram vm with 4gpu crypto miner,
so I dont mind isolating that single core on boot.. I still game with other 7 cores on host.
I could run On Demand instead, but I would run shared 2core VM in that case, and it would be bigger impact on gaming
Libvirtd can be disabled and then only run when you want to use the VM, if you want to do things that way. But there's no real risk in leaving libvirtd running in the background. I've run my systems that way for at least the past 12 years- started out running it that way on an i3 with 4G of RAM and it didn't really cause any performance issues when not running the VM.
I saw the same thing in another video - a line was added in terminal set it to startup as default. Wasn't sure if there was another way to do it or not.
@@joshuapk9808 thought someone else commented on another video that having it on would slow VIrtualBox down - if you have both VMs on the same machine.
show me performance differences, not boot time
Your main "selling point" seems to be the faster boot time. To me, that's a non-issue.
I think the implication is that, by extension, it's faster in every other area as well (I'm not too sure, as I haven't used passthrough-less virtualization in ages, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is). But besides that, there are SO many more tweaks and customizations you can do to make it significantly faster, that is simply missing from VirtualBox entirely. GPU-passthrough is an obvious example, and it's easily a better, safer alternative to dual-booting.
With different distro/OS, the boot time does not matter as long as the performance during normal usage is the same. He is testing with the same distro -- slower boot time means slower in everything else especially those with heavy disk usage.
Why do all of these great open source apps have garbage tier UI's? Is that a must?
u can volunteer and make them lit
@@estonian44 no u 💩
One of the things I love about QEMU is how easy it is to start from the shell with out any GUI.
Qemu with KVM is what convinced me to switch over to Linux.
If I need Windows, I just spin up a VM with everything I need passed through. Didn't have to reinstall Windows or backup its other drives, just passed 'em through.
I even made the ultimate recovery USB so I never have to install an OS on metal ever again.
can you like actually pass through your only installed Graphics Card which the Host Linux OS is using?
@@punch3n3ergy37 Yes, but then it is used by the client until it's shut down.
@@punch3n3ergy37 Yep there are guides that describe this. Personally when i want to play games i just spin up a Windows VM and play them that way.
@@Schweppese does this work with intel uhd igpu?
@@Schweppese and what is Linux using? iGPU?
I looked up KVM in the past and every guide say that you will boot with your iGPU and pass through your video card to the VM. So I dropped the Idea, because my Mainboard doesn't have Display-Out.
I would really appreciate it, if you can explain me again, or even send me a guide. Thanks :)
I'm on Arch, and I made the good switch. Qemu / Virt Manager was more or less straightforward to install, and works like a boss. And with better control over USB forwarding. I can now run iCue to control the LEDs of my chassis and fans without a hitch. I no longer need to do a dual-boot, and may just eventually blow away the Windows hard drive, adding another 2TB to Arch Linux!
Thanks for this.
I find networking iin VirtualBox much easier, e.g. if I want to have a few VMs behind a router VM, I find the network set up much simpler.
Individual VMs may be faster in KVM/QEMU but if you want to play with building a network behind a router VirtualBox is easy to manage.
That's a huge benefit of VirtualBox. It makes setting up a network accessible virtual machine WAY easier than QEMU (a couple mouse clicks, and you're done). I really want to like QEMU, but VirtualBox's network management is light years ahead of it (virt manager doesn't help accomplish this, either). To QEMU's credit, its network setup has improved tremendously in the last several years. Instead of being impossibly crappy, it has progressed to being just ridiculously crappy.
It doesn't matter how much more performant QEMU supposedly is. If it won't let me easily setup network-accessible VM's, it has no performance at all. That's always been where my QEMU journey has ended, which is a shame. It's always been so close, yet so far away.
@@anthonyobryan3485 I'm curious what's so difficult with virt-manager setting up networks? When you are configuring a new VM, when you add the NIC to the VM you just set it as a bridge to the host's network adapter. Assuming there's a DHCP server, the VM will grab an IP on the host's network and you're all set. (Or you can configure a static IP but since we're talking about ease of use here, DHCP is easier.)
Virtio networking just works, it's pretty easy to set up
@@joshuapk9808 OK. I just tried again using the virbr0 device and it's working. (For those playing at home,) I selected Network source: Bridge device, Device name: virbr0, and Device model: virtio.
I tried all sorts of combinations before and couldn't get it going. I am wondering though if it was due to some conflict between KVM/Qemu and VirtualBox because I think I'd been running a VBox VM in the desktop session prior to trying out a virt-manager VM. I've noticed that if I have VBox running I can't get a virt-manager VM running and vice versa.
I think I have to just pick my poison and stick with it. I may have previously had virt-manager/KVM/Qemu mis-configured as I think I've fiddled with permissions since first experiencing trouble.
Hey ho. This is why I love Linux. Always new things to find out.
Virt-manager networking sucks big time. I once managed to configure it in about 10h to do what virtualbox does by default: making de vm available from the network AND from the host via the same IP with a bridge.
I want to run Windows with basic graphics accerelation without passing through stuff, and Virtualbox is miles ahead of Qemu. Its VMSVGA graphics provides lot better graphics performance in WIndows guest compared to Qemu's spice or whatever. For Linux guests, Qemu is stellar with Virgl acceleration and is a no contest.
or linux too for that matter. Im trying to run Linux Mint on my Unraid server and its horrible slow without a dedicated/passthough gpu. I have an better experience with Linux Mint in VMBox under windows.
Virgl acceleration being stellar has sadly not been my experience so far. I never figured out why though. Under these circumstances, VirtualBox is the faster option for anything desktop sadly.
It's a type 2 software hypervisor. It's crap due to it's architecture as your CPU is using hardware emulation for alot of stuff. A type 1 kernel level like qemu and even Microsofts hyper-v can all share your hardware with little performance hit in comparison. Another nice feature is you can put your computer to sleep as your vms all share kernel level stuff with your host. There are also less bugs as a result of this as stuff is shared and integrated
@@AP-rc4dg update your virgl, I had a friend with a bad experience on his card and it turned out to be a bug in virgl, he reported it and I'm pretty sure they are working on a patch now
@@cheeseisgud7311 Thx for letting me know. I have a 5500XT from AMD, so Navi 14 chipset. It performs decent in other areas under Linux. I also get direct rendering in VMs. But the performance is at around 23-25 fps max in glxgears, so not enough to match the refresh rate of the monitor. Hence dragging around windows is super sluggish. I stopped trying at some point, but I will try again in the coming days and see if anything changes when I run qemu from cli instead of Virt Manager.
Is this update which fixed your friend's bug very recent?
Thanks for the setup video. I've been trying out Gnome boxes as well as QEMU to compare to the Vbox installs I usually use. Launch is faster, but overall performance of VBox seems pretty good once launch is done. The biggest hurdle for me in QEMU is dealing with shared folders. Very awkward compared to VBox GUI setup. I'm not a CLI guy, so it's tough. If there was something like Virt-Managers USB mounting GUI, that would be a great improvement.
Yes, you're right.
However, most of the work can be done in virt-manager. You just need to set up a squashfs "filesystem" there. With 9p support in your host kernel, you can mount it with a single command.
Probably there exist some other way to do it as well with libvirt/virt-manager.. Or maybe the developers of virt-manager didn't do the proper job of adding this function, not sure.
Used VirtualBox for the last 2.5-years, made the switch to QEMU about a month ago on my desktop and laptop. Need a Windows box to run Excel spreadsheets for work. The change over was straight forward. Definite performance benefits using QEMU. Cloning and backing up QEMU is very simple. Finding no reason to use Virtual Box going forward. I did lose my Windows OEM license when I made the switch, Windows picked up on the hardware change. Enjoying your videos again, thanks for all you do.
there are many bootlegged versions of Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 free online and a few YT videos on how to get around the licensing during install.
Yes, QEMU is the way to go for sure and it's a great way to host a hypervisor in a VM so you can run VMs on a VM on a host running QEMU. It may sound silly at first, but there's a lot of good use cases for doing this as well as making it a great way to do labs while you're learning about virtualization without needing a fleet of physical computers for it. Though you should make sure you have higher system specs for doing this.
One use case I've had is deploying a VM to run GNS3 so I can virtualize network devices for doing modeling and learning labs. This meant all the network devices were running as VMs on the GNS3 VM on my Linux host running QEMU.
Hey man, interesting use case there! Would you be willing to share your set up and how to configure that?
@@kempoutzzz Documenting all my tinkering like that is something I'm slowly putting together so I start an online blog site about it. My goal is to just get my own unique spin on how to put things together out there so that someone can learn some new trick, or at least what NOT to do when it doesn't work, and I do like documenting when things go wrong for some laughs. lol
I'm still very far off from being able to launch it though. In the meantime, tools like GNS3 and Eve for simulating networks for learning and/or lab work are pretty well documented and there are videos online on how to set them up too.
For Windows 10 many people say there is no noticeable difference in performance between virtualbox and Qemu, but VirtualBox much easier to use.(boot up doesn't mean performance)
This is the first video of yours I have seen. My initial observations:
@0:00 - Virtual Box, It is a terrible machine manager ...
@5:06 - I'm not saying Virtual Box is terrible ...
Make up your mind. Is it terrible is it not terrible? You cannot have it both ways.
@5:35 regarding QEMU "It's very easy to set up once you know everything about it"
That's a pretty true statement about lots of stuff. I have used Virtual Box a little. It worked fine for my needs. I have heard of QEMU but never used it. Would it be easy for me to set up not knowing anything about it?
Given the number of subscribers and your "vast skill set" you must be an authority. Be authoritative here too.
Once I heard his first statement I knew that he is not the authority he pretends to be. I have used VirtualBox for many years on Windows, Mac and Linux with very few problems. None of them were related to performance. His main selling point here is the faster boot time and I couldn't care less if there are faster alternatives for booting (-but even that looks fishy as I have many virtual machines that boot much faster than his example so either the test is rigged/a poor configuration or other problem.) QEMU certainly has other advantages and there might be reasons why some people would prefer it over VB. Most users however will find VB good enough for their needs and from an objective stand point it is certainly not "terrible". Setting up QEMU is a nightmare when you do it the first time. VB is super easy and you are up and running in no time.
I used VirtualBox whilst studying because that’s what I first learnt to use.
I came to love it (albeit didn’t really try anything else coz I was still learning it all) because of the detailed help available online and multi-platform ability, I figured out how to keep my VMs on an external SSD (rather than use what was at the time outdated study Windows computers with HDDs) and avoid exporting and re-importing a VM when I’d use it at home in the Mac (because I figured out the folder structure of the working files).
I'm glad you defined KVM. I'm still old-school and think "Keyboard-Video-Mouse"
After watching your PulseAudio And Alsa video, I watched this one. I have used Virtualbox and Debian for years, I recently ditched Debian except for one old laptop. I'm now using ArchLinux on a PC and a couple laptops. This video has pointed me to look further into using QEMU/KVM on my ArchLinux machine. Thank you! Liked & Subscribed.
I'm all for qemu, especially when I want to passthrough my second gpu to the vm (windows/linux/*bsd). KVM + Qemu + io_uring + nvme storage is close to the barebone machine in I/O performance. I'm using the combination in EPYC server and VM can get 1-2 GB/s write performance with less than 5% CPU.
you are not the kind to make a step-by-step tut on YT for that ?
Have the same experience with QEMU,. It's just faster. Love the content, man. Keep it coming.
I just installed Qemu under Windows but was most disappointed to discover that it has no UI to help sort through the dozens of EXE files it comes with and installed no documentation on how to use it, despite that being checked off in the installer. I also couldn't find any answer to whether it requires and uses Hyper-V under the covers, which is a huge show stopper as Hyper-V pretty much breaks any of the third party VM based applications that I use every day. Not going to use Qemu if I can't figure out how to actually invoke and configure it as a persistent VM, so it can run from something other than an install CD image (as all the examples I could find online showed).
I haven't had a look at QEMU for years, sounds like it's time to revisit it. Thanks for a good overview of what it can do now.
I tried QEMU back in the day, it is SOOOOOO much better now! Last time I was ready to chew my fingers off.
If you are building a server definitely go with the qemu stack.
However, if you need for small tests I don't think it is that good.
For example, try to forward a port from the host do the VM....
as with everything it depends on your individual needs
at one situation VBox will outperform QEMU, in other QEMU will outperform VBox
some strenghts of VBox are running legacy systems, and networking different virtual machines together
Definatly gonna give this a try, I have been fed up with virtualbox for quite awhile. Thanks
Hey Chris,
Great video as always. I had a wierd thing happen. I loaded up virt-manager on my Debian bspwm (BigDebian) machine. It would take 20-30 seconds to start as a user but would start immediate using sudo. So, I took my other computer which is the same other than being in a desktop case vs a tower case. I loaded my typical minimal Debian install and went through my procedure. Then I loaded virt-manager. It works just fine.
I've done a lot of messing around with different apps and some compiling as well on BigDebian. I figure that I messed up something in the process. So, I think I'm going to use LittleDebian to test this stuff out and spare my main machine (BigDebian).
Sorry to hear that you got sick. Covid is a nasty piece of work. I know of three people in my circle that have gotten it in the last two months. Two ended up in the hospital. I am self isolated which has worked well for me since I'm basically a social introvert anyway. I pray you get well soon. Take care and Stay Safe.
That sounds really strange. However, general delays can sometimes be attributed to DNS issues. It has to connect to the Host when launching virt-manager and probably where this is going wrong.
Check to see if you have yourhostname 127.0.0.1 in your /etc/hosts and research connecting to session host.
Also you can try to launch your VM direct from terminal using the corresponding QEMU terminal command without a GUI frontend. I'd be curious to see if this has a delay.
Also, check to see if you get delays when issuing virsh commands in terminal. Start with listings and status command to see what you get.
Forgot to mention: I am feeling a lot better today. So I count myself lucky that it only took me down for about 5 days. Wish you well!
@@ChrisTitusTech Thank you for all of the suggestions. I took another tack and did the minimal install with bspwm. Then I installed virt-manager and it worked correctly. After loading the rest of the software, it again started misbehaving. So, one of the software packages is the cause of the problem. I'll find out which one tomorrow. That will bring me much closer to how and why. ;-)
I love the names of your PCs. I have Small One and Small Too, both running Debian, Redline, Rainbow, and GreenGlass which all run windows 10 pro. Naming computers is fun.
Thanks! this is perfect! I use Ubuntu now pretty much exclusively but still have a need for windows for a few apps.... and one of them needs the GPU (Reality Capture) and QEMU pass through solves the problem that Virtual Box couldn't handle. This was easy to setup, thanks!
Another option if you are into a GUI VM manager, especially for those on rpm based distros like Fedora, CentOS, Rocky, Alma, RHEL would be cockpit.
But I rather prefer doing this stuff on the CLI with e.g. virt-install, qemu-img, and virtually almost everything with virsh.
Last but not least vagrant is a great tool to kind of automate setting up your vm boxes.
I wanted to switch to using qemu instead of virtualbox but didn't know about virt-manager. I usually use VMs for some quick testing of random things and just want to get a quick VM running without having to hassle with CLI commands. This will help me a lot! Great guide!
I think there is an error in the methodology of this test. What are the chances some of the performance is due to disk caching? The machine was first started with Virtualbox and he mentions both tests use the same virtual disk image, so the second run with KVM/QEMU would be faster due to IO caching. Any additional suggestions?
I've been using VritualBox around 10 years or so. I didn't bother learning or trying other software. Today I heavily rely on VM usage. VMware on my machine runs better Windows and Linux. QEMU is by far the best on Linux. Machines start instantly, snapshots are easy to make and you have bunch of settings that are easily editable.
What about bridging the VM's network with a wireless adapter? Virtualbox makes it so easy, but on QEMU/KVM its a pain. That is why I run VirtualBox on my laptops and QEMU/KVM on my desktops
Nice to see this video, because starting to use Quemu/KVM is just what I did.
I still having a lot of VirtualBox VMs, although I migrated these to Linux as well (I am talking about the host OS), because on my W10 installation I wanted to start with WSL2, which badly interferes with virtualbox and causes it to crash.
But Quemu, with kvm enabled, is much better in performance. And I really like it's simple setup with simply a shell script line base.
The docs are a terrible mess though. Anything that you want to know is hard to find and everything you do not need to know is easy to find.
Two questions:
1) What's the QEMU experience like on a Windows host? You briefly touched on how that's not a great experience, but do you have a video about that?
2) What's the QEMU experience like if you are running on a Windows host, with a Windows guest?
Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
(I understand that you are showing a Debian-on-Debian example, but I'd be curious to see what the qemu experience is like if it was say Windows-on-Windows (WITHOUT Windows 10's WSL because I'm still running Windows 7.)
Thanks.
Its bad
The only problem I've encountered with QEMU is getting around some of the quirks involved with starting some games... there are still some titles (specifically FH4) that just won't start in the hypervisor. I'm sure there's probably something I can do to 'hide' that from Windows and make it 'think' it's running natively on metal, but I haven't had the time lately to figure that out.
QEMU is definitely the virtualization tool for getting the most out of your hardware for VMs, though. Thanks for talking about it!!
Bro knows more about VMs than I know about myself, bravo
Can't take videos like this serious. There's no need to put down virtual box unless you have an incentive for it. Just say you prefer something else and that you recommend this and keep it moving.
Except for when you compare it to the others it's quite literally worse in every way that matters lmao
I always tried to make virtual machines and I just found up your video. It is really interesting to see what other softwares can do when we compare them to popular softwares.
First of all, I must say that I'm a really big fan of your Channel and of Your work in general That you're trying to make computing more accessible For the average user And that you Have made for yourself an objective to broaden up our Horizon Beyond the Windows Realm
I'm a Linux newbie and I like it so far so much so that it has become my main operating system of choice for daily tasks on my dual boot system And since discovering Linux I barely boot back into windows
however, regardless of how Linux is wonderful, you can't escape the fact that sometimes you have no choice but to resort back to Windows and for that purpose, I've tried a few virtualization platforms and I must say That I totally agree with you that out of the bunch of all the available virtualization platform virtualbox is the most inferior And since my favorite virtualization platform Which is VMware and I know it probably sounds sacrileges for the unwavering Linux user but I digress and although it's possible to install it through the Aur its implementation can be very flaky
at least on Arch-based distros so I've resorted to KVM however now I'm considering deploying a standalone virtualization server so I would like to ask you did you had some experience with virtualization platforms such as proxmox and alike and if so I wonder maybe you could be able to
make a brief introductory guide for beginners in proxmox
however if not I will understand and yet I would like to ask you please get back to me and tell me what do you think of my idea
I’ve used VirtualBox for a long time and it works just fine, whether it’s for study labs or a Kali Linux vm for network scanning. If I really need great performance then I just put it on a real platform like VMWare or Hyper-v.
Hello Chris, for sure QEMU is much faster. But what about installing legacy OS such as Win Xp (if there is a need to use old software that works on older windows)? Vmware has vmware tools and VirtualBox has also guest OS tools. Does QEMU have something similar like drivers to support win xp on it?
The whole difference for me is that it just works. Virtual box never gave me any internet connection problems. Whereas kvm suddenly stopped working. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't and I just can't get behind why
One nice thing about Virtualbox is that the VM settings are stored with the disk images. So adding that VM in Virtualbox on another distro is trivial. KVM/Qemu isn't as easy I don't think (please let me know if I'm wrong). The VM XML config is in /etc/libvirt/qemu - can that file just be copied to the new distro? What about VMs with snapshots?
"it's free, it's on every operating system, it's easy to use. That's all it has going for it."
Don't disrespect "easy to use". "Hard to use" usually subverts any on-paper good qualities of a hard to use system.
thank you for showing absolutely nothing on how to continue..
Thank you sir, with my freshly rebuilt laptop I will give this a try over VirtualBox. I have used both in the past and honestly never really even thought about performance. Again, thanks
For me, setting up sparse/grow as you use it type VHD is tad difficult with virt-manager. Other than that its absolutely breeze to use with no guest additions to be installed and upgraded from time to time.
it just throws me off that I have been working on single gpu passthrough with kvm and all of a sudden chris posts this. XD
I use virtualbox to run some windows only POS programs for managing my store. I would love to migrate to QEMU but what about guest additions that virtualbox provides, is there an alternative for that
I have to say, setting up storage in Qemu is confusing compared to Virtualbox....maybe this is just an experience issue but I would rather deal with slow performance the few times I need to access a VM than having to fight a GUI interface in Qemu. Why do I need to separate everything into "pools"? Can't I just tell it to apply the ISO to a given hard drive? I expect this is part of the functionality that makes Qemu so fast, but trying to install Windows 10 in a rush and I always just end up using VirtualBox
Was using Manjaro btw - not surprised my experience may differ
Im actually surprised to learn QEMU is faster, would be nice to see some more benchmarks beyond a bootup. Memory footprint, CPU utilization? What is QEMU doing to get this advantage over VirtualBox? Great video!
No no! Ingore QEMU! Trust Viltrualbox!
I spent over an hour and I couldn't find proper info about qemu. While with virtual box I had a VM running in 10 minutes.
easy to use -> this is basically what really counts for 99% of people
Chris, I have a lot (30) VBox machines (all distros of linux) on my Win10 system. Each one serves a different purpose and all I run on them is Firefox. This approach does a nice job of keeping snoops like Google and Facebook from seeing other sites I use for affiliate stuff. I don't really want to create a dual boot system, as over the many years I've used VMs, Win updates always messed up the boot sector and I have to fix it.
Actually it's kvm that's doing the work. Qemu is just an interface.
No lol. What the hell? And you got 15 up votes?
KVM is a few kernel functions for activating hardware accelerated virtualization on the CPU and trapping i/o requests. QEMU is the engine that emulates the hardware such as the graphics, sound, motherboard, disk, etc. When the virtualize machine runs code on the CPU, and the code tries to access input/output, the KVM hypervisor traps it and sends the request to QEMU which handles the hardware emulation. QEMU and KVM are both required components. You cannot use one without the other.
Virt-manager and GNOME Boxes are the GUIs for this stack.
Lol for real ? Do more research before commenting
If only virtual-manager had built in bridged nework. It doesn't. It will NAT a 192.168 but that's NOT bridging. You should be able to access the bridged VM from your local network but you can't. For instance, spin up a web server and try to access it from something other than the hosting machine and it's inaccessible. VirtualBox does do this, just put the NIC in bridge mode and you're done.
I rarely use VMs, but the last time i used it, qemu had no 3D acceleration, so it was a very sluggish UI experience. Virtualbox has working Directx acceleration on windows.
"Working" is an overstatement.
That's not entirely true ... I tried Windows 10 VM on an Ubuntu 20.04 distro, and I could not use my GPU ... I had 3D acceleration ON and I don't know if I did something wrong but I could not utilize my GPU... I even had the extras from VirtualBox installed...
@@andreas.karatzas It's supposed to work with older Windows and DirectX versions. But I tried to use it to play some XP games, to no avail. And last time I checked, it was even REMOVED from latest Virtualbox versions, I had to install an older one.
@@sovo1212 Exactly.
Good stuff. I haven't used VMs much recently, but I was one of the first to give the thumbs up for VirtualBox. Competition is always a good thing and we end up the winners!!
I can say 100 % for sure your config for Virtualbox is not identical to the kvm(qemu), if i use Virtualbox i get below 10 sec startups on all the linux distro i try, maybe check your settings.
I also get faster boot times than what the video shows across multiple Linux distros, but if you want to sell something, you should really overdo it.
Personally i think the Virtualbox boot attempt is unjust vs QEMU, since its the first attempt that loads your data from your non-volatile to your volatile storage, and the second attempt takes advantake of this and the higher speeds.
Awesome video, thanks for your cocntent! I have several questions.
1. Can you compare the same but not using KVM, like if you use qemu for windows images, does it work faster?
2. Can you passthrough hardware in non KVM images, like video cards? Like for example if I want to use windows for playing modern games, can I use qemu and passthrough the Video card there and play from there?
3. Can I use qemu on windows, you mention the version is not so good, but does it have the same features as being able to passthrough hardware?
Thank you. This was the kick in the pants I needed to finally commit to moving away from VirtualBox. The difference in performance is, frankly, astonishing. My Windows VM finally doesn't feel sluggish, esp. on startup.
No!!! Uninstall QEMU!! Reinstall Viltrualbox!!
@@valledesertico if you want to be a fanboy atleast spell the product you are shilling correctly
@@safeforwork8546 LOL
Hello Chris, Thank you for the wide variety of ideas you share. Wondering with Qemu, I know you're not fully involved in "Mac", but using Qemu as Hypervisor on macOS - may a video, or ideas to do it right in your realm? I'll appreciate any links, feedback, e.g. Have a great week!
No harm to use virtualbox in windows environment, plus, utilities like osboxes is make it easier to deploy and dispose. But, to balance it, learning qemu is really have good selling points in work resume.
Thanks for sharing, friend.
VirtualBOX is good for WindowsXP ... Not for more 🤣
I also need to know the answer. Trying to take nostalgia trip :)
@Kenn Honson X no no, XP with VirtualBOX and guess additions work good with software developed for XP
Virtualbox has a GUI. The opposition is a half-ready typical Gnome effort.
Sorry Chris, but I do not agree. On my hostsystem VirtualBox is much faster, than QEMU with Virt-Manager. Starting a fresh installed Debian 11: Virt-Manager 33 s, VirtuslBox 22 s. Adding a bridge interface is in VirtualBox one click away, no frickeling on the linux host system. Scaling the Guest-Window is in VirtualBox much easier and smoother than in Virt-Manager.
One thing I like about VirtualBox is that your snapshots are hierarchical. It makes it easier to organize and switch between snapshots. One thing I like about QEMU is that you can close the display window without shutting down the VM client. It can remain running in the background.
You can run headless virtualbox machines, there are command line options for that. Not exactly what you're saying, but close in some way.
Great video! I knew there were differences in configs, but I did not know that QEMU was that fast.
I always used vagrant for quick setup of development boxes (Nowadays a lot transitioned to docker), and virtualbox as provider always seemed to work good enough :)
Frankly, I don't see the virtualizer as bad.
I worked with pretty much everyone, including Qemu.
from there to say that the virtualizer is bad there is a long way.
Just because something better exists doesn't mean it's bad. I currently have it in my humble laboratory with hardware mounted inside the motherboard's own cardboard box, (I always wanted something like that) And I tell you that it's going strong. I have other lab kits but they are beasts compared to this one.
Currently the limitation of this home lab is the 64 GB of ram that the hardware itself can mount. Quietly, I'm running about 11 Vms. They want to power a linux core + Qemu/kvm and then they tell me.
Good video
QEMU can emulate a lot of hardware one doesn't have - it's on a completely different level. Current windows builds don't seem to support multi-processor in UEFI - this could be a firmware problem, though. I have crashed QEMU's vvfat driver many times. Doesn't appear to be a lot of Windows developers working on QEMU, tbh.
VirtualBox usually just works in Windows. One problem I've had is trying to boot off a VISO in UEFI.
It's nice to have such powerful tools.
On a Windows host, QEMU is WAY slower than VBox. I installed Windows 10 with both of them, QEMU had 5 CPU cores given to it, and VirtualBox 1 core. QEMU had more RAM given to it too. And I didn't even start the VirtualBox VM until QEMU was at the "Getting ready" installation part, giving QEMU a huge head-start. VirtualBox completed the installation before QEMU. I couldn't put acceleration on QEMU, so that may have had something to do with it.
Before this, I was trying to make QEMU work for at least 4-5 hours, and this is the one where it finally worked. VirtualBox just worked without hassle. Also QEMU used around 65% CPU ON IDLE, and VBox around 5-10%, and I couldn't even use the QEMU VM because it was completely frozen.
2:12 Virtualbox has it's own hardware virtualization engine, but it's type 2, KVM is type 1.
I have been using VMWare and decided to try Hyper V, once I setup the machine and tested it, removed VMWare. What a difference in performace.
If you are using windows there is no simple way to get QEMU (Unless you compile it yourself, which most people dont want to or dont want to do it), the link in the official site seems to be dead, i agree Virtual Box is slow, but if you are on windows you have the free version of VMWare. And if you are using linux yeah you can use QEMU, but that would be very little people compared to the amount it uses windows.
i tried qemu and i could not change guest screen size, as i remember.
I never been able to use QEMU, I didn't know that there are font-ends for it. I'll give it a try the next time I need a virtual machine. Thank you.
My build time went from yawning and watching paint dry to about 17 seconds. I'm a QEMU believer! Also you mention VB might be better for noobs but, if you don't mind running Ubuntu as your VM, you can get Multipass from canonical which is a fire-and-forget wrapper on top of QEMU, and it works on Linux, Windows, and macOS. Two 👍🏼👍🏼 for QEMU-based VM solutions!
At 5:05, Chris says that he's not saying Virtualbox isn't terrible, but his literal first words in this video was "Virtualbox. It is a terrible virtual machine manager."
If you just want to play around with different distributions, it's fine. But if you want to actually use the VM for anything meaningful, then KVM/QEMU is the proper way to do it.
Any chance for a guide on Arch Linux, or, will your guide work if I can figure out what dependencies from your Debian list? Thanks man, great video, was just looking for something like this after your livestream yesterday using QEMU!
It's something like this: sudo pacman -S qemu virt-manager virt-viewer dnsmasq vde2 bridge-utils openbsd-netcat edk2-ovmf ebtables iptables libosinfo (dmidecode). Ebtables vs iptables, I think ebtables is the recommended firewall. dmidecode is optional, can't remember what it does. Libosinfo lists the OSes when Virt-manager asks what OS the ISO contains. Very short list otherwise. I don't think Win10 is even on that default list. Then theres the permissions. To the image, if you run that from other harddisk (not from /var/libvirt or whatever it is). You need permissions to access it all the way. Not just the folder it is in, the whole tree structure. So Virt-manager can traverse there. I don't remember the command.
Hmm... Never had a problem with VirtualBox being that slow. A clean fresh install of Ubuntu or Fedora workstation 5 to 7 seconds. A fully tweeked out Ubuntu or Fedora server install running a Splunk indexer. Maybe 10 to 15 seconds or so. Not defending VBox in the least. But never had a VM take 30 plus seconds to load.
I don't know what his setup is, but I get into Linux using VirtualBox much faster than his system does. I installed the OS-dependent software that goes with VirtualBox. I forget what it's called now.
Both Qemu and VirtualBox have different advantages. And, I'm not a noob. I've been writing software on multiple versions of Unix, on VMS, and on CPM, DOS, and Windows, and I've been programming for over forty years.
It's interesting that saving 20s on boot is somehow important now! My frustration with VB is guest additions, Ubuntu desktop and other distros just never feels right, display resolution is hit and miss - half the time I'm looking at a 640x480 black box in a white window on a 1080p screen. If I could just use a VM without the hassle then Linux would be my daily driver
Hi. I have had some problems with Qemu in the past but of course is because I didn''t have knowledge about it. I'll give another chance because I like it so much. Thanks
As the vbox may be slow, it is easier to use:
- Guest additions help you transfer files
- Doesn't need to everytime after close and open to change resolution.
- Pre-installed GUI
I actually prefer VirtualBox over Qemu, and the way I've configured it, it outperforms qemu for me. But that is entirely the core problem, it really depends on what you need it to do, to make one faster than the other. I need it mainly as fileserver, and VirtualBox's .vdi outperforms qemu's vmdk. That said, you can now configure VirtualBox to choose which emulation type you want to use and you can set it to kvm and it will use kvm rather than virtualbox, so you can have 2 VM's run through VirtualBox where one actually runs using kvm with its performance and quirks. Yes, kvm also has its quirks.