On 3/4/2010 4:49 PM, Martin Kraus wrote:
Hi. I have been wondering what is the difference between qemu and qemu-kvm packages for kvm virtualization. Manual page in qemu packages shows, that it should be able to work with kvm. Uncle google is silent about this. thanks for clarification mk
qemu by itself is full emulation. the kvm variant uses kernel virtualization. There is also an "accelerator module" variant, if you run into an issue that prevents you from running kvm.
Just use Virtualbox if it's a desktop, and xen if it's a server.qemu by itself is slow; kvm has "issues". The virtualization people are always arguing over which flavor of VM tech is best. It boils down to 1.)security and b.)hassle.
I find I prefer more security, less hassle. Unless you are running a medium-to-big shop, you probably aren't worried about live migration and power density, you just want to run XP under Lenny. In that case, install virtualbox-ose and forget about whose hypervisor is better, or whatever. The only reason I can think of to give this any more thought than that is: either you are getting paid, or you are getting a grade. If you don't trust Virtualbox, VMWare has a "free" product. qemu is fairly stable, but I never heard of any real advantage it has over other virtualization implementations. vbox just keeps getting better and better. I hope Oracle's acquisition of Sun doesn't change that.
xen is still immature, but it works well. You can try it out easily; it has a live CD. More hassle, but more interesting.
I hope someone else adds to this, because I haven't really explained it in technical terms, and I'm too lazy to do the work now, but I would like to remind you that Google works really well, and last time I checked, Wikipedia was pretty well crammed with articles on virtualization. I seem to recall a chart comparing every vm implementation to every other implementation EVER.