[ale] phpvirtualbox

[JD]

On 05/11/2011 01:05 PM, David Hillman wrote:
> I was using VMWare ESXi (free) to manage my test environments until I
> found out about phpvirtualbox (http://code.google.com/p/phpvirtualbox/).
>  Anybody used that?  VMware has pissed me off because they don't give me
> the freedom to use the API the way I want to and the VI client requires
> Windows.  Giving away the product for free is useless if the API is
> locked down.  Getting away from that platform has been one of my goals.
>  Just wanted to share.

There are lots of more-open tools for virtualization than from VMware.
* Xen
* VirtualBox
* KVM
* OpenVZ
* UML
* Containers
* Jails

So PHPVirtualBox is just a front end to VirtualBox and the VboxManage
tools. If you don't need HVM support, then you can put lots more VMs
into containers like OpenVZ than you can hardware virtualized solutions
like ESXi, KVM, QEMU or virtualbox.

Some tools support both methods - Xen and Proxmox support paravirtual
and HVM, for example. Assuming you want OS level virtualization,
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Operating_system-level_virtualization
may be helpful.

I've used Xen, VirtualBox, KVM, ESX/ESXi, Jails and Containers for many
years. Mostly Xen and ESX, but VirtualBox on my daily use laptop for 2+
yrs. I tried virtualbox on a server and it wasn't stable enough. It
locked up every few days with a single Windows-VM that wasn't doing any
work.  My new deployments use either KVM or OpenVZ and Proxmox is a good
way to simplify the management for both.  As with anything, there are
pros and cons for everything in the virtualization world.

There are 6+ products named "vmware xyz" related to virtualization, so
we need to be careful about just saying "vmware" so we don't confuse
others https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Vmware#Products

VMware ESX/ESXi can appear to be very picky about supported hardware
too.  This only matters when YOUR NIC or disk controller isn't
supported, I guess.  Linux-based VM tools aren't nearly as picky.