[TAG] Talkback:144/howell.html

[Drag Sidious]

yep.

You can thank a large part of Virtualbox's robustness on it's mature
underpinnings. It's one of a large number of VM solutions based on Qemu
code.


Other Qemu family members...

qemu-launcer -- gui to launch and manage qemu virtualization machines

qemu -- the original
 
kvm kernel modules and kvm application -- turns the Linux kernel into a
hypervisor, userland portion is a hacked qemu. This takes advantage of
the virtualization featues of newer AMD and Intel CPUS.

Win4Linux -- commercial application for running Windows on Linux. 


Kqemu -- Accelerator for Qemu. Originally closed source kernel, it's
open source ransom was paid by the Win4Linux folks and is now GPL.


The performance of KVM vs Kqemu vs Virtualbox vs Vmware vs Xen (running
with full virtualization. Xen's paravirtualization approach is still
easily the fastest)


It's good for not only desktop stuff, like virtualbox, but it can be
very good for server stuff also. 

It's not up to the same level as true hypervisors-based virtualization
like with Vmware ESX or Xen (although as hardware vm support matures KVM
is going to be big), but if you have a need for a couple servers and you
don't have any spare space.. then Qemu (with KVM or Kqemu) is your man. 


For example.. Qemu has a mode of operation were you can run it headless
with the -nographic switch. Instead of a GUI box it will turn your
console into a serial terminal. If you configure your host environment
to use the serial console and then use Lilo's serial console support
then you can effectively run your servers headless. 

Then use screen to launch the VM and you can have multiplexed serial
consoles for all your VMs on that machine. 

Then there are lots of other clever things you can do with it like use
LVM logical volumes as block devices for harddrives rather then loopback
files and advanced networking with switching/router/firewalling.