[OpenIndiana-discuss] What advantages of KVM over Vbox

[Geoff Flarity]

On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 7:18 PM, Geoff Nordli <geoffn at gnaa.net> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 1:51 PM, Geoff Flarity <geoff.flarity at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi Harry,
>>
>> I'd stick with VirtualBox if you're not looking to do anything
>> serious. For example, say you just want to run Windows on your OI
>> desktop. Especially if you're using the VirtualBox GUI. One issue that
>> VirtualBox has is that it doesn't respect disk synchronization.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> GF
>>
>
> Hi Geoff.
>
> You can force vbox to flush the disk properly.
>
> VBoxManage setextradata "VM name"
> "VBoxInternal/Devices/ahci/0/LUN#[x]/Config/IgnoreFlush" 0

Thanks, that's good to know. I've sent an email to Phoronix since
that's the only useful source of benchmarks I've found. We use VBox
for development VMs on developers laptops under OS X. Unifying the
deployment environment is very appealing to me since I wear the DevOps
hat.

> Vbox has some nice features and is the core foundation for Oracle's
> VDI solution, which is built on top of Solaris.  I don't know if I
> would use it for a heavy server workload (still determining this), but
> for regular server workloads, it has performed well for me.
>
> Vbox has a new crossbow network stack, but it only works on Solaris 11
> builds >= 159.  I am not sure what it would take to make it work
> properly with OI, but that would be nice.

This is my other concern with VBox.  I won't be buying Solaris 11
anytime soon and I'm very doubtful VBox will get the proper love under
Illumos.  I've been playing around with SmartOS and I'm very impressed
with KVM. I'd much rather pay Joyent support than Oracle should it
come to that.


> Geoff
>
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