In this video I discuss QEMU/KVM and Virt-Manager for running your virtual machines over Oracle Virtualbox and I show you some basic installation and setup you can do to get the most out of your VM’s. We install Kali and discuss bi-directional copy and paste along with SSH’ing into your VM.
I used both, but I prefer Virtualbox, despite or because:
KVM is faster due to a faster disk driver.
VBox has better Windows driver support for the VM and all drivers of all OSes come integrated with the VBox install.
VBox uses the real CPU instead of trying to use another more or less compatible CPU. On my 4-core Phenom II, QEMU insisted to call it a 2-core Opteron.
One year ago in QEMU/KVM 3D acceleration for graphics did not work.
Some options in the QEMU menu do not work yet.
VBox enables to activate Windows using the activation code glued to the PC on which the VM runs. Over time I activated XP, Vista, 7 and 10 on ex-lease PCs using that original activation code. Afterwards you can use the VM on other PCs. I installed Windows XP in Virtualbox in 2011 and it has survived 3 desktops and 2 laptops.
I stick to Virtualbox, because I have 50 VMs including all Windows versions. VBox has a superior and RELIABLE GUI. I compensate for the disk IO speed by installing the 15 most used VMs on my nvme-SSD (3400/3000 MB/s) and by using ZFS with lz4 compression, reducing the number of IOs with almost a factor two.
My Linux VMs boot in ~10 seconds, booting from the ZFS RAM cache shaves off maybe 1.5 seconds, because the Ryzen 3 2200G CPU is the next bottleneck. My Host OS is a minimal install of Ubuntu 19.10, because Gnome has a great workspace GUI to run the VMs in full screen.
I moved all my activities to VMs and I use 5 VMs almost daily:
Xubuntu 18.04 for office, email, whatsapp, torrents etc. Loaded always.
Ubuntu 16.04 exclusively for banking and paypall
Ubuntu Mate 19.10 for trying out new apps and other stuff, using local VBox snapshots
Windows XP for playing my old CDs/LPs with WoW and TrueBass effects
