Virtualization Platforms for Linux

Discussion
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Having read this article I am still wondering what is the best/easiest VM software. I’ve used VMWare for quite a while, including ESX way back when, and running on Windows Servers, hard to beat.

Now I’m sliding toward Linux full-time, don’t like the way it runs as a VM, and looking to run Windows 11 as a VM very occasionally.

I have found some hacks that bypass TPM and Processor checks on the guest when installing in a VM, but I still have two concerns:

  1. Leaving Secure Boot on raises a lot of complications, pretty much all the Linux flavors of VirtualBox and VMWare Workstation Pro are the same complication: you have to sign some kernel-mode drivers, and not every distro makes that a simple task. Is QEMU/KVM any different from the two leaders (VBox and VMWare) in that respect?
  2. Import of one VMDK into another “ecosystem” is sometimes problematic; only the two leaders seem to be able to read each others’ vdisks without a lengthy conversion process. Anybody find a workaround?

TIA,

Alex

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I’ll be interested to see what people have to say. I’ve used mostly Virtual Box on Linux because it’s simple. I’ve used a bit of Gnome Boxes but went back to Virtual Box.

Proxmox sounds like a pretty good solution for Linux and Windows VMs and can also run containers. I haven’t used it but maybe someone else can elighten us.

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KVM is built into every Linux kernel - i.e. you get it out of the box… well at least for the last 20 or so years anyway… I think you do have to enable one setting or service to take advantage of it - but if I remember correctly - installing KVM / QEMU / VirtManager etc takes care of that for you…

I’ve run VMWare Workstation on Linux before - and VirtualBox…

I prefer KVM… or QEMU/KVM - and I don’t use it from the CLI - I use “virt-manager”…

Getting bridged mode (where your VM guest is an “object” on your LAN) to work on KVM wasn’t easy - but got there in the end with a bit of fiddling… I think I documented some of it here in some other thread… I used two NICS - a dedicated one for my Ubuntu system, and a USB3 gigabit dongle for a bridged NIC.

There’s plenty of CLI tools out there for converting VHD/VMDK and QEMU images back and forth…

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I second that. It has the best GUI for VM’s

@Almo ,
Your article did not mention virt-manager… that is a serious omission.
Using Qemu/kvm from the CLI takes some practice… use the virt-manager gui.

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Yes @abhishek seems to have written replies to all the comments in that article, so curious to me as well why KVM/QEMU isn’t mentioned while Hyper-V gets an honorable mention.

It may lack a few bells & whistles but it is a level 1 hypervisor, so performance is good, and no mucking around with module signing, etc. Seems to run Windows 11 passably well too. And I believe (others may want to chime in) it is true FOSS and seems to be actively maintained since it’s kernel mode software.

As @daniel.m.tripp mentioned, it’s trivial converting VDI/VHD/VMDK formats. Also, the Broadcom site where Vmware free is located never allowed me /o download it even after giving up a decent amount of PII. Sigh…

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Gnome Boxes is all I use. If a distro fails, it goes on my naughty list, never to be tried again. There are too many compatible distros to waste time on the ones who don’t play well with others.

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You might consider publishing your naughty list.
Some people like to know what to avoid, others go looking for interesting problems.

Boxes seems to me to be rather finicky and it does not offer many options to change the VM 's properties. I would not be surprised if some important major distros failed your Boxes test.

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Off the top of my head, Nev, I think the distros that fail the Boxes test are the ones whose iso files don’t have a live capability. And then there’s the distros that hog the disk entirely rather than create a grub menu listing all the distros present in various partitions on the disk. Fedora and Open Suse fall in that category. Debian/Devuan and their progeny are most useful in all respects.

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Thanks, I often wondered about that.
Someday we need to document installer problems.

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I could usually install and run any distro I tried. The problems started when I ran an update. If I am on Ubuntu 24.04 and want to try 25.10, it seems to work initially. Then when I update it won’t boot for me anymore. I had thought maybe it was due to the kernel of the VM being newer than what I’m running on and with Gnome Boxes the host kernel is shared. Right?

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Within Boxes, a distro being tested live isn’t really installed. Updates don’t work. Distros without a live function can sometimes be installed in the 20G slice of RAM that Boxes uses; I’ve never tried updating those. My guess is that you’re correct.

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I dont think so. I think that only applies to containers, not VM’s

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I have modified a distro in Boxes … that is like an upgrade, ie it changes the filesystem, so it cant have been live? I must go back to Boxes and check… I feel sure it does more than run a live iso… you can do that without Boxes.?

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If Boxes fails to run a distro directly, I’ll dump it into a Ventoy stick and boot that. Sometimes it works.

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A stick without Ventoy must always work.

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This is also what I prefer. The newest version of Virtual Box isn’t bad either. But I always tend to use QEMU/KVM more. I tend to play around with older operating systems, so when it comes to QEMU/KVM, I use CLI because Virtmanager doesn’t play nice with them, but newer operating systems it does fine.

also an interesting project is Quickemu -LINK- it is a wrapper for Qemu

I’ve never messed with GPU passthrough (not sure if that is something you wanted) which I believe can really only be done with QEMU/KVM

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I did some research and Boxes does not share the host kernel. The problem could be that Boxes uses KVM acceleration, which passes through host CPU features directly to the guest.

This is faster and closer to bare metal, but it means the guest kernel update might expect certain features or drivers that don’t align with the virtual hardware profile Boxes is exposing

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So does Qemu. I dont see such problems there.

My guess would be that Boxes has inherited some Gnome quirks.
It is a strange UI… sometimes even the builtin distros in its own list will not boot.

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This conversation has gotten me back around to the basic (non-)problem that needed solving: coaxing a little more life out of my 15-year-old Core i7 motherboard with 64GB RAM, but lacking CPU and TPM chip needed for MS Windows 11.

But for any of you kind people old enough to have read Cuckoo’s Egg in the 1980s, all computer problems start with a very tangential, edge problem that produces unexpected results and expands learning by working your way slowly to the core.

As mentioned, I tried three approaches: VMWorkstation “Pro” (couldn’t ever obtain the bits from the Broadcom site); VirtualBox 7.2.4 which had a number of issues on machines with TPM/Secure Boot enabled; and, QEMU/KVM (also tried the QuickEMU suggested by @JoelA ).

So (drumroll please) the winner was: All of the above! A polished GUI? VirtualBox is hard to beat, even more active development than VMWorkstation. Need SecureBoot/Hypervisor layer 1 support? Yes you have to put on your propeller beanie and dig down into XML editing and CLI quirks and bizarre graphics subsystems, but QEMU/KVM comes out well on top for most Linux mainstream distros. There were a lot of articles to cull through, but the best one I found to walk me through the installation and maintenance was this one.

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Well you dont need to use CLI to get qemu/kvm , but you can either with qemu directly or with virsh. The easy approach is to use the virt-manager GUI.

My machine is an early i7 with 64Gb? I dont try to run Win11, but it copes with any linux and will run several VM’s simultaneously. Having that much ram is a big bonus.

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