Please educate me on what is a good windows alternative to KVM cause I use windows a lot on desktop and I really need a lightweight and powerful virtual software application. And I cant use WSL cause I need it to be able to use virtual harddrives such as VHD and VDI’s and also need to virtualise Windows.
What’s wrong with hyper-v?
4 Likes
That’s what I’m going to use, from the research I have done it seems to be the best.
I honestly don’t like Hyper-V. It only seems to work well if the VM is a Windows guest. I have tried everything I can to get Linux distro’s working even semi-decently on Hyper-V and it just refuses to play nice. Also can’t get a MacOS VM to work on Hyper-V, works just fine with VBox with a little configuration.
VirtualBox is better at linux vm’s for me, to a degree. I’ve been toying with something called QEMU and the GUI interface QTEMU. It apparently can emulate specific chipsets and features at a near hardware level. It’s interesting, not the easiest thing to get working, and has some quirky bugs like setting how many cores you want to use but it works pretty well.
1 Like
Hyperv is fine unless you’re using it for DESKTOP virtualisation. Outside of windows guests the guest desktop experience is a bit crap.
For server stuff it seems to perform better than ESXi in my experience on hardware I’ve tested it on.
You’ll need windows pro or higher to get it though.
3 Likes
If you’re doing a lot of desktop based work, then I would recommend VMware Workstation Pro if you can afford it. In the past two years I’ve been using it, I’ve had absolutely no problems running Ubuntu or Windows VMs for desktop use.
If you only care for server based applications, then Hyper-V should be the go-to, it’s already in Windows 10 Pro. Supports Windows, Linux and even FreeBSD.
If you want a relatively good desktop experience for zero cost, then consider Oracle VirtualBox. While in my prior testing, it’s not as performant as VMware Workstation, but it’s usually more than adequate for the task.
1 Like
In standard MS fashion, it is probably because they have a competing product, WSL2 which basically runs a MS/GNU/Linux VM in the backend that has a kernel level translation layer.