Saturday, 16 October 2010

Creating virtual machines with ubuntu

When you have ubuntu as the main operating system, you have several ways of creating virtual machines for testing:
KVM (free and built into ubuntu)
  • VMWare player (free player)
  • VirtualBox from Sun (now Oracle)
I have used all three and it appears to me that (amazingly) VMWare player is the best of the bunch. WHY?
  • Quicker boot
  • Snappier screen response
  • Better support for USB devices
  • Allows cut-and-paste operations between ubuntu desktop and the virtual machine
  • Nice user interface for managing the virtual machine parameters
  • Easier transfer of virtual machines to Windows Hosts (i.e. your colleagues)
My tests were with jaunty and karmic. Maybe meerkat has improved things...

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