Hi guys I am looking for a good VM to run windows on top of Linux so I can use Xamarin studios for a project. Do you have any recommendations for a good VM?
I've had good luck with VirtualBox.
But I haven't tried very many others... at least for a long time.
The good news is that VirtualBox is pretty common and essentially free.
However if you want to do some advanced stuff, like video card pass thru, virtual 3D, USB3 pass thru, etc.. there might better options.
But if you just need a basic Windows VM, it'll do the trick.
I use Virt-Manager with QEMU/KVM and its works pretty well.
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Depending on your Distro, VirtualBox is going to be a more "apple-like" experience, wherein you get stuff that more or less "Just Works"
virt-manager and QEMU are going to be more robust and potentially have better performance, but both VirtualBox and QEMU use KVM as the underlying hypervisor on Linux.
As far as creating the VM, it's going to be the same as installing a regular OS.
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VirtualBox should work, I think it will be fine for what you want to do. Just something to be aware of, is if you use Xamarin to make IOS apps, you will need access to a Mac via SSH (you can set this up in Xamarin) to actually compile and test the application.
So it would make more sense to virtualize osx.
That may change some things if we need a mac anyway. I may be able to convince my team to just use Android Studios.
As much as I abhor to advise people to use Apple hardware, iOS development is best done on a mac.
We have a mac person on our team so maby I can just put him in charge of that.
I've been using VirtualBox on top of Debian to run Windows 10. I downloaded the developer versions of the OS provided by Microsoft, so all the extensions will be there. So far it has worked great here is the link:
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virtual-machines
I suggest Android Studio. You will probably have access to more classes and android APIs using the Java Language than using Xamarin.Android. I forgot what the thing was called that allowed you to write Android apps in C++, but nevertheless, You are better having a team of skilled Java developers work on an app for android,
instead of having a team of C# developers exploring Xamarin.Android and maybe finding it a little bit of a struggle. There are plenty of tutorials sure, but I can almost guarantee you will have a better time using Android Studio and Java.
I'm no professional in this topic, but I hope my small amount of experience can be of some help to you.
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Ive tried both Virtuallbox and KVM/QEMU/ Im leaning more to Virtualbox myself. I run bleeding edge distros a bit and virtualbox holds back the VM just enough to keep them working.