User:Jack Palmadesso

Intro

The following tutorial is a pretty advanced topic. I will attemmpt to do my best in being as clear as possible but you need to be warned that if you have not worked with Linux for very long you might get lost.

For a few years now the Linux kernel has had the ability to run virtual machines natively. Most people think of Vmware or Virtual Box when they want to run virtual machines. These are good products and have come a long way in making virtualization a reality. While it is possible to get these products for "free" and use them there are drawbacks to using these products. For the most part these mainstream products are streamlined and present a nice gui to an end user. These usually do a good job in making the complex task of virtualizing a machine simple but there are drawbacks. The "free" versions usually disable some really nice features like "snapshots" or they might restrict the amount of resources that can be assigned to a Virtual Machine.

There are also the problems. The guis can be a bit buggy and not always work correctly. Of course support is not going to be possible so you will have to live with the problems until the next update. With Vmware and Virtual Box there are also some packages that need to be installed in the guest to make them work "properly". This is usually some form of driver that makes the Virtual Machine aware its being virtualized or presents a layer to trick the Virtual Machine into thinking its on some real hardware.

I am not knocking these products. There are quite a few out there now and its really amazing how far they have come. I actually remember around the year 2000 when Vmware was giving away its product for free with Suse Linux. They were the only one in the space at that time. Now there are dozens of products and most of them work pretty well. At this point in time virtualization is just a fact so the various OS vendors are now building vitualization into thier product. Microsoft has Hyper-V, Oracle has Virtual Box and Solaris Zones, and all Linux distros have the ablility to run either Xen, or KVM based virtual machines. Xen is on the decline in favor of KVM now.

Its pretty safe to say that if you use the native products that are built into the OS you will enjoy an advantage over a product that you add-on. Think Microsoft and Internet Explorer or Apple and iTunes. These applications will enjoy lots of advatages over competing products because they can take advantage of some unpublished hooks. These hooks will give the native applications many advantages over competing products that are installed afterwords. Virtualization is no exception to this rule.