[PLUG] Virtualization on Linux

[JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org>]

I'm using VMware Server 1.x for various things, especially including 
running Windows full-screen local-console so my Mom can use it while not 
actually running Windows on bare-metal.  While it has always been a 
giant PITA to get to compile, I have been unable to get it to work with 
Ubuntu 9.10, and I assume 10.04+ will only get worse.  I dislike VMware 
Server 2.x because of the terrible web "GUI" interface.

I've had various minor, but for my purposes show-stopping problems with 
VirtualBox, and sine I loath Oracle in general and am afraid they will 
just kill VBox in particular (see also Virtual Iron [1]), that is no 
longer an option anyway.

I'd love to use something that this kind of thing won't happen to, and 
that Just Works with Ubuntu, so I did some poking around in the Lucid 
repos on my beta VM [2].  Also, two of the machines I will need to do 
this on do NOT support H/W virtualzation per the "egrep 
"flags.*:.*(svm|vmx)" /proc/cpuinfo" test.

This is what I found.

# QEMU & KVM are now combined
qemu-kvm-extras - fast processor emulator binaries for non-x86 architectures
qemu-kvm - Full virtualization on i386 and amd64 hardware

# GUIs & helpers
aqemu - Qt4 front-end for QEMU and KVM
     # http://aqemu.sourceforge.net/
qemulator - a solution for easy setup and management of qemu
     # http://qemulator.createweb.de/
qemu-launcher - GTK+ front-end to QEMU computer emulator
qtemu - graphical user interface for QEMU
     # http://qtemu.org/
ubuntu-virt-mgmt - Common packages useful for managing virtual machines 
graphically
	virt-manager - desktop application for managing virtual machines
	    # http://virt-manager.et.redhat.com/

# Will not use, but FYI
virtualbox-ose - x86 virtualization solution - base binaries
	# I assume still no USB in "OSE"
vboxgtk - simple GTK+ frontend for VirtualBox


What does everyone else use?  Anyone use or like any of the "helper" 
apps?  Any other comments?

Thanks,
JP
___________________
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_iron
[2] My personal VM test bed runs on VMware Workstation, and I'm actually 
pretty happy with that, but it is not free and not suitable for the use 
above.
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP            |:::======|      http://bashcookbook.com/
My Account, My Opinions     |=========|      http://www.jpsdomain.org/
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"Microsoft Tax" = the additional hardware & yearly fees for the add-on
software required to protect Windows from its own poorly designed and
implemented self, while the overhead incidentally flattens Moore's Law.
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