Is kvm with virt-manager better to use over virtualbox and vmware
 

Hi, I am curious to know if kvm is better, fair, or worse to use over virtualbox and vmware.

Here is my view:

KVM: Pretty good, performs well, the only drawback I see is that you can't have snapshot like you have in VMware. Copying the full image itself for backup is wastage of storage. Can handle load pretty easily.

Virtual Box: Haven't used it since 2013 at that time I had trouble setting up Virtual Box on my Linux machine and finally switched to KVM instead. Can't comment much.

VMware: Provides you ability to have snapshot, easy to configure and manage networks. Affects base machine (host) if under too much pressure which is not the case with KVM. KVM somehow manages the load.

I am fine with KVM for test machines, but if I have VMs which required to be backed up I prefer VMware as it is easy to take snapshot rather than taking full image backup.

Choose your poison according to your needs: You need 3D acceleration in the VM? Then no KVM. It has to be somewhat fast 3D acceleration? Then Virtualbox is out of the race. ... .
This list can go on and on and on. Without telling us your exact use case we will not be able to give meaningful recommendations.
I personally use Qemu/KVM for the rare case when I want to virtualize a non-Linux OS, for everything Linux I go for the much simpler and more lightweight containers, be it systemd-nspawn, LXC or Docker.

I heard from a podcast if your CPU has a flag that supports vmx or svm then kvm is a better choice.

My cpu is a intel xeon with vmx built-in. I have experience using virtualbox and vmware but not kvm and virt-manager. I did find a good link on setting up a kvm with the virt-manager.

http://virt-tools.org/learning/start...-virt-manager/

I will give kvm a try. Thanks

check your facts, KVM supports snapshots, and always has.

None of the solutions can provide good 3D without utilizing a video card. And surprise - KVM can utilize those cards as well as any other solution.

All of the mentioned virtualziation tools make use of hardware virtualization (that is what those flags stand for), if it is available. KVM does not work without it, though Qemu should do software virtualization in that case (never tried that).

The 3D acceleration provided by Virtualbox and VMware is good enough to be used for 3D accelerated desktops and simple games. PCI passthrough is still experimental and has to be supported by your hardware (mainboard, CPU, videocard and drivers). More a problem is that you need a dedicated card for the VM, so you have to have at least 2 videocards in the system, or even more if you plan to run more than one VM at the same time with this feature.

The "3D" acceleration you are talking about is at the same level as basic intel video adapters, essentially 2D. You can play old games and watch movies using that technology, but nothing really heavy. And here comes the big question - have you heard of Spice or QXL?

As for video adapter passthrough, it's been around for at least 5 years, if not more. Hardly "experimental". You do need VT-d/IOMMU, but that applies to all virtualization systems, not just KVM. Besides, there are additional approaches KVM provides, like VFIO, and the newer KVMGT

That something is around for 5 years does not mean that all the problems are worked out. We have X around for 30 years and it still has massive problems in certain areas.

I have used KVM with various types of passthrough in 4 figure physical host deployments, 5 figure VM counts. Hope this helps lift your doubts

Not really, at least not to the point where I would recommend it. Let's just agree to disagree on that topic.

My mistake I should have put it in a different way. The way KVM handles snapshot and the way VMware handles snapshot is quite different. Here I am not talking about the backend what I am talking about is from layman perspective how it looks in the frontend. You can easily manage your VMware snapshot whereas when you are dealing with KVM snapshot it is hell messy.

When I am dealing with VMware snapshots I can easily keep track of what are the changes I have made and why I am taking snapshot whereas in KVM you have to keep track of your image files.

So from management perspective atleast for me VMware works better than KVM when it comes to snapshot. I prefer taking my image backup in KVM rather than taking snapshot because: 1. I take snapshots quite frequently and managing them is quite difficult 2. Image backup once in 15 days works for me.

[QUOTE]In fact, they handle snapshots in the exact same way, moreover, you can use vmdk formatted disk images with KVM/Qemu. What you probably mean is that the VMWare UI provides a snapshot management window which makes things nice and visual, while pure KVM does not. What you fail to realise is that KVM doesn't compare to ESXi or vSphere, it is only a hypervisor, and nothing else. If anything, it compares to vmkernel (as a Linux kernel module along with the kernel itself). Now, please tell me, how do you manage snapshots using vmkernel only, and nothing else? Oh wait, you cannot, another surprise, eh?

Now, if you want to compare apples to apples, and you insist on comparing vsphere or ESXi, you need to compare it to a KVM management solution, oVirt, RHEV and Proxmox come to mind then.

Here's an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rrkg9rWFc4M

Good luck with that. If someone who is dealing with large production KVM deployments in the last 7 years isn't enough of an authority for you, I doubt anyone would be.