Virtual Machines under Linux and Windows

Hey there,

I'm currently using the VMWare Player for my virtual machines (nothing fancy, mainly just dinking around and using them as an overly fancy way to save the current state of my development environment). But I have my main rig dual booting Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu (Elemenary OS but that is subject to change).

I'm curious if there is a Software that supports Linux and Windows as host operating system with the guest system being whatever it needs to be.

I'm aware that I can reboot the machine into the other OS if the need for a VM arises but as I said: I'm curious.

I'm using Virtualbox on both my windows machine and linux machine, it's not extremely advanced but it supports tons of guest and host OSes.

You mean like an emulator? Yes, they exist. Several, though I don't know the names because I don't use them. I don't like the hassle of it and the performance loss you usually get with them.

If I need a Windows program to work in Linux, I turn to Wine. Preferably, just have two computers, one Windows one Linux. But that's expensive.

Edit; yes, virtualbox. That's a very popular one.

I mean a complete virtual machine because I need more than one program. I've discovered that it is quite effective to just set up a new virtual machine for every university software project, you can open it where you left it without hassle.

Thanks for the suggestion of virtualbox. I'll look into it in the next days.

Depends on your needs. Vmware and Virtual box is fine for typical use. Vbox is much lighter than VMware although sometimes less stable. It also supports MAC OS so if you want to give the VM to someone with a MAC, that VMware does not support, Vbox is the solution.

If you need more advanced stuff there is KVM for Linux host systems and XEN for everything, which are enterprise solutions. But these need setting up and huge amount of studying. For your case Vbox and VMware are probably the best.

Okay, that sounds good. Virtual Boxes OS X feature might come in handy although I hope I will not use it.

In terms of VMware: Which is the latest version for Linux? I have only found a version 4. something.

Vbox sounds promising though because I'll be running about three VM's on the same machine at the same time. They will be running a Firefox with two to three tabs open and periodically refreshing and a VNC Server. I was running all 9 tabs in one single instance of firefox but that kept crashing every hour or so.

Gotta dive into VBox in the future.

I haven't actually used VMware on Linux for ages, I am not sure what the latest version is. I normally use Virtual box.

Try adding more ram for Firefox (and I assume flash), they are HUNGRY :). Hope that helps.

EDIT: Ah, I used vsphere at work the other day, but that’s a cloud based solution. I am not sure that will meet your needs.

EDIT EDIT: https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/free#desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_player/7_0 that should be the one. I think. if not https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/downloads this link gives you all their products.

I have found out too that VMware Player 7 is the latest for Windows and 4 is the latest for Linux, that was the reason for me asking. ;)

The machine runs 16 Gigs of RAM (I have another 4 somewhere here), that should be fine since I will be probably be using Lubuntu (sitting at ~300MB Ram usage in idle).

The numbering between the linux and windows versions could not be the same but I do have VM player 7 for Linux on Debian. https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/free#desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_player/7_0

BTW make sure you give a good deal of swap space when you install the OS on the VM cause for whatever reason the VM needs it for Ubuntu.

There is the alternative of using Proxmox and visualizing everything. See Wendell's video on youtube.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvDMLNAxYbI

There are several virtualizers that work on different hosts. On Windows though, these usually consume much more system resources than needed.

If your problem is that you want to run appliances on different hosts, then the solution is simple, because most virtualizers under linux, including the open source KVM performance king, will let you import and convert just about any overlay from any commercial or open source virtualizer.

Using appliances in both Windows and Linux hosts is a complete waste of resources though. You could just go for a single linux host or dedicated (also linux-based) virtualization environment (Xenserver, proxmox, etc...), or a hybrid solution, for instance an OpenSuSE host with full Xen virtualization environment at boot. In that environment, you can then run as many appliances as you want, and not worry about the platform it runs on. You can also run a Windows appliance with PCI passthrough for the graphics in both KVM and Xenserver for your gaming needs. This has the added benefit of being able to secure your assets by controling and limiting the access closed source software like Windows has to them, it limits the storage space that is wasted by Windows because the overlays will be intelligently compressed, and you do not need the convert or waste storage space on double storage of various appliances, and everything is always synced up. If you go for a linux host, you also have the added benefit of enhanced disk performance, enhanced virtualization performance, whole platform emulation if needed, much better stability and reliability, and of course the incredibly useful ability to snapshot your appliances at any moment, and snapshot you host system. These snapshots load in seconds, they are a huge time saver, especially when the goal is to do experiments.

Okay, that sounds good.

I'm kind of unwilling to virtualize my windows machine though since I'm of the opinion that one needs a full physical windows machine in one's household to tackle any of the unforeseeable and weird problems one does encounter as the resident nerd.

So I'm killing off my plan for using VMs from both host operating systems. That is not a dealbreaker, just a minor annoyance I will have to deal with for a more robust solution.

@Garfield what Edition of Windows 8.1 are you using? If it is Pro then Hyper-V is built in, you simply need to enable it and install the Hyper-V manager.

Ubuntu runs fine under this with a few caveats on sound and 3D graphics - Microsoft's hypervisor is only good for a virtualised desktop experience if the guest is Windows. If all you want to do however is spin up Ubuntu VM's running firefox or some server daemons it will be fine.