VM - something Old, somthing New

General Discussion
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I decided to look into running a VM in Linux. I did a quick web search for “Linux virt manager” and got a page that read “11 Best Virtual Machines for Linux for 2026.”

Of the 11, I had only heard of 3 of them. KVM/QUEM Virt-manager, VirtualBox, and Gnome Boxes.

Something New - Running a VM under Linux for me. I was wondering from the experience users here on the forum if they might have some tips for me and what VM do you prefer.

Something Old - I had experience with a VM back in the 80’s on a mainframe computer. We were converting from the an OS called DOS/VS to an OS called OS/VS1. With VM, we were able to run both operating system during the conversion over to the new OS.

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All I know about Gnome Boxes is that it also uses KVM - i.e. it’s another front end to KVM like VirtManager I believe - i.e. uses the same virtualization as Virt-Manager defaults to…

Except I think Virt-Manager has more QEMU stuff inside it?

I dropped VirtualBox in favour of Virt-Manager because it uses my Linux kernel’s native virtualization “hypervisor” - i.e. KVM…

I’ve used “VM” for years - not as long as you @easyt50 - I did use MVS from about 1992 as a mainframe operator… But never got that “low level”…

Tried out VMware workstation when it first came out… 1999 or 2000ish?

2008 - I did a whole bunch of VM stuff on Solaris with Sun Sparc T1 series (the T series sparc CPU have a hypervisor)… None of that stuff was easy - it was ALL 100% CLI and configuration files…

Also had a little bit of exposure to IBM LPAR on p-Series AIX boxes…

Then a bunch of VMware - had my own ESX “lab” at home… But never got around to doing vCenter or vSphere - so I just used the Web UI on the ESX hosts (x2).

Also tried Proxmox - pretty sure that just uses KVM…

And I also did a whole bunch of work on Oracle VM for x86 (no relation to VirtualBox whatsoever) - this use the Xen hypervisor (which I believe originated as a Citrix product)… i.e. farm/cluster of 4 x OVM for x86 systems…

I still don’t really understand the diference between paravirtualization and just plain virtualization…

Then there’s the “other” layer of appearing to run multiple servers on the same hardware (or VM even) : containerisation :

IBM had it decades ago on Mainframe and AIX
FreeBSD has had jails for decades
Solaris has containers or Zones - but some of Sun’s “super enterprise” big iron had containerization built in in the 1990’s - but it wasn’t what we know today as “Zones”.
And then Linux got LXC and Docker some 12-13 years ago? I’m still unsure of the difference between LXC, docker, and “kubernetes”…

Proxmox is basically a frontend to both : i.e. KVM and Linux Containers… But you run Proxmox as the main O/S - it’s not an app you can install…

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I am with @daniel.m.tripp … I use virt-manager

Some time ago I did some joint posts with @Rosika on virt-manager
Search for virt-manager in the forum … you will find them.

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I prefer Virtualbox, simply because setting up a VM with network attached to the real LAN (so that the VM’s are visible via LAN to the othe computers, and the VM can reach networked printer for example) is just so easy, even on a laptop having only wifi connection.
Virtmanager/KVM has some nice features, such as emulate a different architecture (for example run an arm64 VM on a x86_64 hardware), which is impossible with VBox.
As for performance of the VM (running Win11 on Debian 13 host) I experienced KVM slightly better, but for simplicity, and easyness of network configuration (no need to set up bridge) I still prefer Virtual Box.

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For a short-term peek at a new distro and not creating a network connection, I still prefer Gnome-Boxes.

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My knowledge of gnome in garden … :rofl: :joy: back to the funny farm for me !

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That’s my visual image of the contributors to this forum!

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Righto : I have the long beard :check_box_with_check:
Wrongo : where’s my pointy red hat! Doh! ☒
Am I about 2 feet tall or less? No! 6’4"! Doh!

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Drunk
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Me celebrating a little too much after my first successful Linux install.

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I started with virtualbox. Then qemu/kvm -cli … then added virt-manger. All have their pros & cons.

I still use (play) with all of them. My opinion- Virtualbox is probably the easiest to setup for novices. Qemu allows you to do the most -and if you add virt-manger to it, it makes it a lot easier to set up VMs. (almost as easy as virtualbox) Really depends on what type of VMs you are planning to setup.

I’ve also played with 86box, trs80gp, BasilikII, Sheepshaver, miniVMac , DOSbox- all these are used for older operating systems..

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I agree with that Joel.
There is something about these programs that are first developed for Windows … they work in familiar ways for Win users.
I found Vbox irritating, because I have never used Windows … The Windows feel works negatively on me.

Have you tried Distrobox? It is more a container than a VM , but you can run whole distros in it.

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Progress report.

I tried Vbox and was able to create a VM for LMDE. However, I could not get MX to load. MX kept saying 32 bit was not supported. The GUI is very nice and Windows like.

I tried Virt-manager and after some testing was able to load both LMDE and MX.

Thus is great. I can install a distro into a VM and test it without re-booting my PC.

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Well done … Virt manager is not the easiest install
That proves there is nothing wrong with MX.
I wonder why Vbox thought it was 32 bit?

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I’ve seen this happen with VirtualBox on Windows… If you’re already running a HyperVisor (i.e. HyperV - MS’s virtualization) - you can’t run x86_64 VMs…

This happened to me on a work laptop - it was doing some nefarious stuff and had HyperV running - and it couldn’t be disabled… VBox would install and run, but couldn’t boot x86_64 Linux distros…

I basically gave up - used WSL on it instead… Then brought a personal laptop from home with Linux on it…

I suspect you’re running KVM (i.e. a hypervisor) in the background - and VirtualBox can’t use the AMD-V or Intel-VTX if you are already running a hypervisor with hooks into virtualization (i.e. kvm).

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That’s what I have done with VBox too. Virt-manager works well so there is no need for me to go back and try to find out why MX would not run in Vbox.

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Great.
If you want to copy/Paste between host and VM in virt-manager, you need to install spice-vdagent in the VM

apt install spice-vdagent

in the VM.
You will see two programs called vdagent and vdagentd running, if you look in the VM with ps

Vbox has a similar mechanism, but I cant remember what it is called.

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Makes sense, but the error message is obscure to say the least.

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Some of us have more pedantic requirements - e.g. @nevj or @kovacslt - and me - we like our VM to appear on our LAN as if it was regular host…

Doing that is a piece of cake on VirtualBox… But setting up bridged networking on another O/S is kinda “rocket science”… Not easy even on a “n00b” O/S like Ubuntu…

I got it working once (on Pop!_OS 22) - then I managed to break it and couldn’t get it to work again… The I got it to work on Ubuntu 24.04 and haven’t looked back…

Here’s what I want :

I deploy a VM and I want it to appear on my network and do plug and play shit - like get a DHCP lease from my router - use Avahi to announce itself on my LAN… let me SSH to it from other hosts on my LAN - and - SSH to it from the KVM machine hosting it (that latter bit doesn’t work using virt-manager’s macvtap bridge - but otherwise macvtap works)…

That last paragraph describes something that just “works” on VirtualBox if you select bridged networking (not the default for a new VBox VM)… And this paragraph describes where Kali numpties get stuck when they want to do their Kali shit to get a bullshit cert - they’re almost universally morons who don’t understand TCP/IP, VLANs, LANs, and ethernet - never mind bridged devices… These numpties can’t even figure out how to have their Kali VM on their Windows machine get on their LAN - never mind passthrough of a USB “monitor mode” Kali compatible WiFi dongle… Most of them barely got their crayon license, bugger the biro!

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I just remembered something else that’s a piece of cake on VirtualBox - and I’ve yet to attempt on KVM : device passthrough…

e.g. in VirtualBox - you can set a USB device to passthrough to a VM… This is the point that new Kali wannabe pentesters get stuck - but it’s so easy I don’t know why they’d find it tricky…

I know there are people out there who do stuff like pass through a GPU to a VM in KVM… But I don’t think it would a trivial effort… and it’s not something I’d try…

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Why do that rather than mount the USB as a filesystem ?
In virtmanager you can mount filesystems natively, or with NFS or sshfs.

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