Patterns

Initially I wanted to write about my positive experience with kvm+qemu but after several weeks of testing the following downsides became apparent:

• currently no support for AltGr
• no copy-and-paste support to/from host

As those issues actually prevented me from productively using guest images with kvm a colleague had the right hint at hand: Virtualbox.

I went ahead and installed the packages virtualbox-ose and virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.24-16-generic and started testing it by creating various guest images using the simple to use gui. I even converted an existing kvm/qemu image to the virtualbox format using the following commands:

# vboxmanage convertdd image.img image.vdi
# vboxmanage modifyvdi image.vdi compact

Finally copy-and-paste is actually working, something even VMware never accomplished (at least under a Linux host). The CPU Hardware Virtualization support (see this post to check if your CPU has support for it) in combination with the Virtualbox Guest Extensions make the guests subjectively run even faster than on kvm/qemu (I did not clock this, though).

As you might have guessed from my fanboy rave positive posting I currently favor Virtualbox over all other solutions as it seems the right tool for my exact needs. As always your mileage may vary.

btw: AltGr works too…
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Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron 32bit
Intel Core 2 Duo T2400 1.83GHz
2GB Ram

Run the following command to find out if your cpu supports hardware virtualization:

egrep '^flags.*(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo

AMD processors would have the svm flag set and Intel processor the vmx flag.

Please note that hardware virtualization also needs to be enabled in the bios before being usable.

usb.present = “TRUE”
usb.generic.autoconnect = “TRUE”
usb.generic.skipsetconfig = “TRUE”

xm list
xm shutdown host3
mount /dev/mapper/vg00-host3_lv /host3
lvextend -L+2G /dev/vg00/host3_lv
xfs_growfs /host3
umount /host3
xm create -f /etc/xen/xm.host3