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

[Richard Pieri]

On 2/12/2015 4:57 PM, Joe Polcari wrote:
> Says it's fixed?

Three years to fix a bug that crashes the VM and takes out the host with 
it. No, I had to stop using VirtualBox because of this bug and a three 
year turnaround on a fix isn't going to get me to change my mind about 
not using it.

VMware offers a free version of VMware Player for personal use. It's a 
lot like what VMware Workstation was before Workstation became an 
enterprise-grade product. I'm partial to VMware's products for desktop 
use because they maintain feature parity across concurrent releases, 
something that Parallels doesn't (at least didn't last time I checked 
which was a few years ago) which complicates copying VMs between 
different host operating systems.

Xen is really nice for what it is but it isn't something that I would 
use for a personal box. While it starts with GRUB and a Linux kernel, 
the dom0 which controls the domU's is itself a virtualized environment 
running above the Xen hypervisor. As such it does not have direct access 
to the hardware so no accelerated graphics and sometimes no audio. Xen 
is most excellent for virtualizing servers. KVM is probably better for a 
personal box since you have a Linux kernel running on the bare metal 
instead of a Xen hypervisor.

-- 
Rich P.