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This is a very late response - hope you find it. I really like the idea of Qubes, but it just seems Not There Yet. Or at least, was when I last looked. Anyway
by __jal 10y ago
This is a very late response - hope you find it.
I really like the idea of Qubes, but it just seems Not There Yet. Or at least, was when I last looked.
Anyway, I wouldn't recommend doing what I'm doing. My home environment is the result of many years of incremental change, benign neglect, not-so-benign neglect, quick duct-tape fixes and grandiose redesigns half-completed. Learn From My Mistakes.
I run two virtualization hosts - FreeBSD and Ubuntu[1]. FreeBSD runs my always-on VMs (DNS, DB, some apps, monitoring, etc.). The Ubuntu box is where I run the Windows VM I mentioned, and sometimes others, depending on what I'm working on.
Ubuntu/KVM is fine as a virtualization host. I'm less thrilled with Ubuntu overall; generally, I don't like some of the decisions they've made. Next rebuild I'll probably be back to vanilla Debian.
I wouldn't recommend FreeBSD/Bhyve to anyone who is not already conversant with FreeBSD. From the perspective of a user coming from Linux, the transition isn't bad, but if you're running VMs, you're at least a part-time sysadmin as well, and managing FreeBSD looks a fair bit different than Linux. Additionally, Bhyve is currently missing some features KVM/libvirt has. In particular, if you want VGA or USB passthrough, stick to Linux[2] for now.
This is all predicated on this being a workstation - if you're doing server virtualization, I really like Ovirt, which requires an RHEL-lineage host OS.
[1] The FreeBSD box used to be "just" a storage server, but has grown up a lot and last time I did a lot of work on it, I renamed it 'spof', as in 'single point of failure', in honor of the role it serves. The Ubuntu box is my desktop machine.
[2] Actually, unless you like the adventure, maybe wait a bit - there are patches soon to be merged that will make VGA-passthrough quite a bit easier than it is now. I had a terrible time getting it working and to a kinda-stable point.