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Is there a big gap between the best hypervisor and the free one? i.e. VMware (Workstation / Fusion) vs Virtualbox I use Vagrant + Ansible for dev work, do you

Is there a big gap between the best hypervisor and the free one? i.e. VMware (Workstation / Fusion) vs Virtualbox I use Vagrant + Ansible for dev work, do you think it's worth it to spend a bit of money to pay for VMware and its Vagrant provider?

dogma1138 11y ago
Depends what is the host and the guest, Virtual box works pretty well on most hosts but the guest quality for Windows hosts is still questionably although it has generally improved. If you need 3D acceleration especially with Windows guests then it's pretty much VMware for either Mac, Windows or Linux or Parallels for Mac. Performance wise VMware is still quite faster than VirtualBox in most cases and if you need to run a fairly complicated virtual network than VMware is pretty much your only the way to go. When it comes to a Windows host if you have the pro version of Windows you get HyperV which as long as you don't need a complicated network is actually better than VMware workstation in many aspects, it's linux support is lacking but if you only run popular distro's like Ubuntu you should be fine. HyperV is much better in terms of performance in edge cases, and it also more gentle when it comes to power consumption so it won't kill your laptop's battery as much as VMware workstation.
ckozlowski 11y ago
If you're looking at a single, stand alone hypervisor, then the differences are not enormous. You could pick your flavor based on whatever you're comfortable with. When you're looking at larger scale and the potential for unique and/or fringe cases goes up, then support for those becomes a differentiator. VMware rather excels here I think, with support for device pass-through and higher resource limits. GPU acceleration, Raw Device Mapping, are some of the ones I can think of. A little past that and it's interaction between hypervisors. ESXi and KVM will do live migration, but KVM doesn't have DRS (yet). I don't think Hyper-V has storage live migration yet, but ESXi does. And so on. They'll all catch up, I've no doubt. I'm particularly interested to see Nutanix with their Acropolis/KVM hypervisor gain these features. But right now, ESXi is in the lead.

dogma1138 11y ago

Depends what is the host and the guest, Virtual box works pretty well on most hosts but the guest quality for Windows hosts is still questionably although it has generally improved. If you need 3D acceleration especially with Windows guests then it's pretty much VMware for either Mac, Windows or Linux or Parallels for Mac. Performance wise VMware is still quite faster than VirtualBox in most cases and if you need to run a fairly complicated virtual network than VMware is pretty much your only the way to go. When it comes to a Windows host if you have the pro version of Windows you get HyperV which as long as you don't need a complicated network is actually better than VMware workstation in many aspects, it's linux support is lacking but if you only run popular distro's like Ubuntu you should be fine. HyperV is much better in terms of performance in edge cases, and it also more gentle when it comes to power consumption so it won't kill your laptop's battery as much as VMware workstation.

ckozlowski 11y ago

If you're looking at a single, stand alone hypervisor, then the differences are not enormous. You could pick your flavor based on whatever you're comfortable with. When you're looking at larger scale and the potential for unique and/or fringe cases goes up, then support for those becomes a differentiator. VMware rather excels here I think, with support for device pass-through and higher resource limits. GPU acceleration, Raw Device Mapping, are some of the ones I can think of. A little past that and it's interaction between hypervisors. ESXi and KVM will do live migration, but KVM doesn't have DRS (yet). I don't think Hyper-V has storage live migration yet, but ESXi does. And so on. They'll all catch up, I've no doubt. I'm particularly interested to see Nutanix with their Acropolis/KVM hypervisor gain these features. But right now, ESXi is in the lead.