[Haifux] QEMU/KVM vs. VMWare: The beauty and the beast

[guy keren]

Eli Billauer wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> 
> I've been playing around with my new Fedora 12 computer (Intel i7 quad 
> core) for a few days, mainly for the purpose of making educated 
> decisions about how to virtualize two old computers, which I want to get 
> rid of. They are running Windows 2000 and Redhat 7.3. I only tested the 
> Windows part (Linux should be much easier). Fedora 12 is the host, of 
> course.
> 
> I've looked at QEMU/KVM vs. VMWare.  I want to share my experiences and 
> insights with you, because I don't like the bottom line, which is the 
> VMWare is better for almost all home purposes (I'm not talking about 
> cloud servers and such). Which makes me wonder: Is VMWare a honey trap, 
> or is it currently the preferred choice?

i didn't try KVM - i did try XEN - and it, too, works in a similar 
)Crappy) manner. i didn't compare it "head to head" with vmplayer on the 
same machine - but it is quite very slagish.

with xen, i did manage to find some... driver(?) that made the mouse 
pointer work much better then without it - did you look for something 
similar for KVM?

i think that the main issue, is that vmplayer is a down-sized version of 
a commercial GUI program (vmware workstation) - and these programs tend 
to be far more polished then "technology-oriented" programs, such as 
qemu. it could be that since KVM is "commercial" meant mostly for 
desktops - they'll have better support in the future - assuming there is 
no collision between the commercialization-efforts of nucleolus/redhat 
and the free-software-ness of the KVM kernel part.

--guy