[Discuss] Are there any no-cost vm's still out there?

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 5:15 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu)
<blu at nedharvey.com> wrote:
>> From: Discuss [mailto:discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org] On
>> Behalf Of Bill Horne
>>
>> My question: does VMWare or Virtualbox still offer no-cost software for
>> home/personal use? I'd like to run both Linux and Windows 7 (for all the
>> usual reasons), but I don't know if I can do it without paying for a VM.
>> TIA.
>
> For a desktop, no-cost, you have:   Virtualbox on any platform.  VMWare Player on windows or linux.
> Since there's only one no-cost option on a mac, the question becomes - is it worthwhile to pay for Fusion or Parallels on the mac?  And I say yes if you use it on time that you're paid to be working.  No, if you're a student who just wants to do cool stuff for free.
>
> For a server, I would recommend nothing other than VMWare ESXi.  Xen is crap, Virtualbox sucks for servers, I'll just mention MS in passing...  And what else is there?  Sure you could do something like KVM on a linux host, but why would you?  In that case, replace the linux host with ESXi on bare metal, and make the linux host actually a guest.

Re: using KVM (or Xen)   You would use them because you want to be the
next Amazon or Rackspace.  It's clear that large organizations get
real work done using these products.   I'm sure they all have real
problems, but they apparently have benefits as well.  The question is
what is your use case.   (The VirtualBox one seems nasty, OTOH, I've
never had that problem in my casual use of VB.)

Re: question of accelerated graphics (from a separate thread)
hardware accelerated graphics != direct hardware access
While I can understand there might be some times that direct hardware
access is needed
for a VM, it seems to me that is opening up a huge potential problem
from a security (and reliability of host OS) perspective.  Personally,
I would prefer a virtualized graphics stack as long as it fully
supports current graphics programming interfaces at a reasonable
performance level.  From what I've seen VMWare seems to be the best at
doing this.  For whatever reason, although stable for me; VB has never
worked for me for more intensive graphics.

Bill Bogstad