[OpenIndiana-discuss] What advantages of KVM over Vbox

[Geoff Nordli]

On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 6:57 AM, Geoff Flarity <geoff.flarity at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

I agree, I am really glad to see more development around the features of
KVM on IO/Illumos.  If they can get the feature parity with Linux there is
no doubt KVM is the best long-term hypervisor choice on OI/Illumos.

have a great day!!

Geoff