I need some advice on which platform to go for!
First of for the hypervisor for my workstation;
VMware Workstation
Hyper-V
Something else?
At the same time I would rebuild my homelab and therefor if there is a hypervisor that would play nice with the workstation choice please let me know.
I have played with Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, XenServer and Proxmox for the server side. I like Promox but the VMware or Hyper would be easier to move VM’s to and from the Workstation i guess.
Is VirtualBox still a thing?
Hyper-V is going to give you the most relevant experience, since it’s the same hypervisor that is used on the server platform, with live migration and hardware passthrough disabled.
I’m partial to VMware. Have used it for years and it is an excellent platform. That said, there can be better hypervisors depending on what you are trying to do. For example, Unraid or Proxmox might be better if you want an all-in-one storage + hypervisor solution. VMware doesn’t have much in the way of built-in storage other than vSAN, which isn’t a great solution unless you have several servers to use.
If you’re running a lot of Windows I would use Hyper-V. It grows on you I find.
Otherwise I personally like KVM on Linux, with the libvirt wrappers.
VMware is great but even when I used it (as a user and kibitzing over the shoulders of the sysadmins) the good stuff is all locked behind the higher licensing costs. I guess Hyper-V does that too but I haven’t noticed as much.
VirtualBox is still a thing i guess but a bit limited right compared?
WMware compared to Hyper-V for moving VMs from the workstation to the server?
@Ghan all-in-one storage + hypervisor is not a criteria. Would like to have a environment that are flexible if needed.
The biggest limitation with virtualbox (at least running on windows), is that it is in practice incompatible with Hyper-V being enabled. It says that it is compatible, but it is really slow, and generally just flat out does not work if anything that uses hyper-v is enabled. So, that means no windows sandbox, no WSL 2, no Hyper-V, and probably no some other things at this point, if you want to use virtualbox.
That would be too many other things to write off then - I do like my WSL too much.
Thanks for the clarification.
Sounds like we are back at Hyper-V or VMware.
VMware Workstation has some integration with ESXi and/or vCenter. It’s not something I’ve played with a lot, but I do know if you have Workstation installed, then it connects to vCenter and acts as your console view when you are working with VMs in vCenter.
That would be something I need to take a look at. For comparison the feeling of local and server-side Hyper-V even with Admin Center is not quiet there yet.
WSL 1 still works fine. It’s just WSL 2 that is unavailable without hyper-v
Also, VMware does have support for running with Hyper-V on, but it is slower than before because the Microsoft virtualization APIs are not great compared to the VMware implementation.
Thanks for all the feedback!
Will do some testing.