[ale] Speeding up VMs

[Alex Carver]

On 2016-01-10 11:37, Phil Turmel wrote:
> On 01/10/2016 08:12 AM, DJ-Pfulio wrote:
> 
>> Since around 2013, I've been 100% KVM for production uses.  Haven't powered up
>> virtualbox on my systems since then. Used Xen for 4 yrs in production, it was
>> fast and stable, once running, but hostOS kernel updates would prevent guestOSes
>> from booting a few times yearly.  Never had that issue with KVM (using it since
>> 2010).
> 
> I switched from virtualbox on my laptop to kvm / libvirt / virt-manager
> / virt-viewer last summer.  I kept vbox on my system until November
> "just in case", but never needed it again.  The only annoyance is the
> sparse selection of VM toolbar functions.  The performance and stability
> of the spice protocol / QXD video driver pair for windows VMs was a
> pleasant surprise.

There aren't many options available as the VM host when the host OS is
Windows which is why I started with Virtualbox.  I'm trying this out on
a home machine first before I try to make it work on a machine at work
(one which I can't change the host OS).


>> If you'd like 1-on-1 help with this stuff, come out any Sunday and sit next to
>> me with your workstation (or remote connection to the VM system) and I'm happy
>> to help.
> 
> Or try the Southwest meetings on Thursdays.  :-)  (Except when Central
> is meeting, though).

Both options are a bit far from California ;)


The guest is operating pretty well now.  The image is stored on an
external hard drive so that will obviously slow things down a little but
it's otherwise quite responsive and gives me what I need which is an
environment that I can test and trash and then just restore a previous
snapshot if things are too broken.  It's also isolated from the main
network unlike a bare metal machine.