F10 -- Xen, VirtualBox, or VMWare?

[Phil Meyer]

McGuffey, David C. wrote:
> Rather than configuring a dual-boot machine for running those occasional
> Windows apps, which one of these virtualization tools provides the best
> (read most accurate) virtualization environment on F10?  Which one is
> the easiest to install and configure?  I had problems with VMWare on F7,
> and would prefer not to go that route again.  I have no experience with
> the other two.
>
> Dave McGuffey
> Principal Information System Security Engineer // NSA-IEM, NSA-IAM
> Save a Tree...Unless necessary don't print this e-mail
>
>
>   

I would vote KVM as well.  Support for native disks and USB devices is 
trivial.  However, the selling points for me of all of them are these:

1. Xen == Novel/Microsoft (yes, MS bought rights to Xen, and development 
stopped/slowed to nothing)

2. VMWare == Windows host focus.  Linux support is sub par and building 
their kernel modules may always be an issue.

3. KVM is in the mainline kernel and gets a lot of (good and bad) attention.

4. Virtualbox == some really old code from SUN.  It requires its own 
device driver and can conflict with KVM.

5. I am a command line/scripting person, and starting a series of VMs 
based upon KVM is easily made to be automatic.

I have no problem typing:

$ sudo qemu-kvm -hda /dev/sdb1 -net nic -net user -m 1024 -soundhw all

Good Luck!