Kent West wrote :
Eugene V. Lyubimkin wrote:H.S. wrote:So, what free and preferably open source choices do we have for virtual machines in Debian? Pros and cons based on your experiences will be appreciated.I was succesfully used kvm and qemu. There is also 'virtualbox-ose' in Debian archive.I'm rather content with virtualbox-ose, but you have to be careful to run a kernel with all the pieces needed (linux-image + virtualbox-ose-modules to match). I'm currently running a -486 kernel instead of the -amd64 I would prefer to run because of this, but, meh.
I'm happily using kvm for both casual testing from iso and running a test server : it's lightweight, fast, highly tweakable and has never misbehaved. Since it's now included in the kernel there is no need for module updating after a kernel upgrade or any other vm-breaking "features". If the lack of an UI is a problem for you, and outside of "virt-manager" which I don't know, you can use "Qemulator" with a bit of tweaking : in the preferences just change the path to executable to /usr/bin/kvm for both x86 and x86_64 arch and remove references to Qemu. Leaves the "use kqemu" preference as is, it will default to kvm if kqemu isn't loaded (any other choice would mess things by adding some arguments to the command line which kvm wouldn't understand).
Happy kvm ! Tom