12 Best Virtualization Software for Linux in 2023

[Bernie Hoefer]

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On 2023-11-24 06:19 UTC-05:00, David Spoelstra wrote:
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> https://www.geeksmint.com/best-virtualization-software-for-linux/
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(I've been on business travel, so I haven't had much time for personnel correspondence.)

Thanks for that link, David.  It was pretty good... and timely, as Marc Snell and I were just talking about virtualization solutions last month.

It is too bad the article didn't specify which ones are Free & Open Source Software.  That is one of the reasons I currently use the one that I do:  because it is FOSS.

I use to use VirtualBox -- and don't get me wrong, it is very good.  It has been years, but I know it had a great GUI interface and some awesome technical features in terms of drivers for Windows machines.  But it required a non-FOSS kernel module that had to be re-compiled (or something) every time I updated my hypervisor's Linux kernel.  One time, something went wrong and I had no access to any of my virtual machines.

Now I use QEMU/KVM with Virt-Manager.  Because it is all FOSS, I've never had a problem during updates and such.  Is it as pretty and user-friendly as VirtualBox?  No, but it serves my needs and is friendly enough to get what I want done.


Side note:  I just recently `solved` a problem that's been somewhat bugging me for a couple of years.  I've never gotten VirGL (software emulation of 3D graphics acceleration) working on my system.  While trying out Fedora 39 via a fresh install to a temporary hard drive in my system, I found that it worked!

Upon investigating, I learned that Fedora 39's QEMU/KVM defaults to using a virtualized Q35 chipset for guests; prior it had been i440FX.  I did not know this, but the virtualized Q35 chipset has support for ePCI while i440FX -- the one I had been using -- only supports PCI.  Well guess which my hypervisor's graphics interface is...


Back to the article:  I'm surprised that it listed Docker as virtualization software.  Although there is overlap between containerization and virtualization, they really are not the same.  (Yet, there are moves to bring them closer together; witness https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift/virtualization .)

The article also mentions Red Hat Virtualization (RHV) as a solution.  (oVirt is RHV's upstream project, FYI.)  Actually, Red Hat has stopped selling RHV to new customers.  Red Hat's suggested solution going forward is the aforementioned OpenShift Virtualization.


Anyway, thanks again for posting that, David!


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