Ditch Virtual Box for QEMU and virt-manager - you will be glad you did!

Chat about Zorin
#4

I am actually advocating VMWare player for Windows virtualization.

Before I settled for VMWare, I run extensive trials for VirtualBox, VM Ware and Qemu. While Qemu was astonishingly efficient, I found it a little too complicated for my requirement.

I never play games and mostly run productive software (MS Office and propitiatory database) on it and I did not see any benefit of Hypervisor.

While I appreciate the concept of open-source VirtualBox, it is less sophisticated than VMWare in my taste. I really feel VirtualBox is way behind the VMWare player especially after (loathed) Oracle got a control over it.

VMWare is not an open source but it is free for a personal use.

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#5

That surprises me that it is free or personal use - I always thought there was a fee.
I don't use Virtual Windows for Gaming as even with 16 Gb RAM and a 2 Gb RAM graphics card, all I used it for for the last year of working was to run Windows Desktop and Windows equivalent apps that did not run well in Linux (BrailleBlaster) where I used QEMU for Windows 8 - the display was crisp and looked like it was using actual graphics hardware - it would not be suitable for games. In fact there was an article on the web I stumbled across that suggested that the safest way to run Windows would be as a VM inside of GNU/Linux. Personally, the safest way to run Windows is to just use it offline for gaming and nothing else. People used to poke fun at the Amiga being only a games machine ... WRONG! I used to prepare the Health and Safety Bulletin when I was a trade union Health and Saftey Officer, on the Amiga 1500 which only had 1 Mb RAM, no hard drive and two floppy drives. I used Page Setter that took 20 minutes to print one DTP page on my Canon BJ-200 but the results were outstanding.
There was a security issue about QEMU recently that states it needs updating and needs the installed version to be removed - it states that this might mean losing any VMs created. I find this strange as once you have created a qcow image in QEMU I would have thought that all you had to do was copy the location that contains the VMs to an external drive you could just copy back. Aternatively, before using QEMU, create VBox images, back those up and then convert to qcow for QEMU later. Prior to moving to Devuan I had been using Windows 7 VM in VB in FerenOS - needed to access work drives (.rdp) - I imported into QEMU/Virtual Macnine Manager and then when work stopped allowing remote access from Windows 7 machine I installed Windows 8.1 Pro as an update to it - was surprised how well it handled this! :wink:

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#6

I do not game even with 64 GB RAM and 4GB RAM Nvidia GPU :wink:
Virtualization was in plan when I built this desktop. I loaded it as much as RAM it could take and the best GPU I could afford. In retrospect I made it a bit over-specked :sweat_smile:

It seems this "free for personal use" scheme is little known.

You must agree with EUA a couple of times during the installation, but it is absolutely free for a personal use.

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#7

Well that's where QEMU (and to an extent VB) scores highly - more than one VM! :wink:

#8

Free version of VMWare can only run one VM at a time.
But I found a work around.
Simply open another instance of VMWare, one could open as many VMs till the RAM saturates.

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#9

I prefer to have one open at a time so that Monday could be MX Linux, Tuesday couldbe Void Linux, Wednesday could be Arch Linux/Manjaro, Thursday could be Artix, Friday Could be Devuan - no point running multiple OSs at the same time - that isn't multitasking, it's multidisaster! :face_vomiting:

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#10

QuickGUI - based on QEMU but comes with GUI.
Read:

#11

VMware Player works for me however. I ran into issues running my Windows 8.1 Pro VM and I am not quite happy with the solution given here on the forum. Booting the VM under VMware notified me that I should increase my swapfile in order to run the VM smoothly, however that creates more wear on a a SSD.

Have you @FrenchPress have any experience with running your instance of VMware Player and how did you solve it?

#12

Since the day one of my switching to Linux (and Hackintosh), I have been obliged to use virtual machines due to the very special application I need for my daily work. I have been using VMWare for over 10 years.

I have VMs stored in a separate SSD from my OS.
240GB <- OS
480GB <-VMs

I run virtual disk maintenance tools time to time

Screenshot from 2021-11-22 12-33-52
Screenshot from 2021-11-22 12-33-52844×666 77.4 KB

in addition to maintenance tools within the virtual Windows (Defraggler and CCleaner).

So far, I've never experienced any shortening of lifespan of SSD.
The current 480GB SSD is at least 5 years old and SMART shows absolutely no problem.

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#13

Another plus point for spindle disks! :wink:

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#14

I run the VMs also on separate SSDs from my Zorin 16 Pro (host) OS.
512 GB <- Zorin OS Pro 16
240 GB <- VMs (of wich 60 GB of preserved for Windows 8.1 Pro for accounting and other office productivity)

However I had to follow these instructions to make it work, however it is not permanent, after each reboot of the host OS, I have to follow that same process.

Screenshot from 2021-11-22 13-40-43

#15

To begin with I was using Feren OS and Virtual Box. On Devuan I attempted to use Qemu and aQemu (the latter being the front end and wasn't getting anywhere until I installed Virt Manager. Now in Virtual box I'd had the image so that it was dynamic so whatever the size of image I had in VB was converted using the qcow function. When I was running Devuan 3.0.0 I followed the save path to /etc/images but after installing Devuan 3.1.1 following hard drive failure I became more confident and set up a folder in /home for images. The image was of Windows 7 Pro 32-bit which due to work requirements I had to upgrade so I upgraded the VM with an old discounted purchase of Windows 8.1 Pro 32 through Education scheme. I was surprised how well the upgrade went. I also had two USB sticks permanently attached so that I could download work stuff in Windows 8.1 Pro then disconnect the VM and work on stuff in Devuan.

#16

how is this an answer to the swap issue in casu running an Windows VM guest under ZorinOS with an hypervisor like VMware Player?

#17

I always add the swap partition manually after the installation of OS. All modern Ubuntu based distros create a swap file but no swap partition.

To do so:

  1. Boot from the USB installer (Live session) and create a swap partition in Gparted (take a note of UUID of this partition) then set it to active.

  2. Boot from the internal drive, open the etc/fstab and edit the entry to add swap partition.

Mine looks like this:
/swapfile none swap sw 0 0
UUID=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (from the previous note from Gparted) sw swap none 0 0

  1. Reboot.
#18

Okay that is certainly worth trying. Meanwhile I also came across this solution which seems to work (for now), perhaps not when I reboot my host (Zorin)OS.

Which comes to following:

  1. shutdown the VM in VMware and close the VMware Player application

  2. run the following command
    ~$ sudo nano /etc/vmware/config

  3. Then add the follwoing line.
    prefvmx.minVmMemPct = "100"

and save file and run VMware Player once more and startup the VM in question.

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#19

Certainly whatever works is fine :slight_smile:
I have enough space on my SSD and I do not mind to spare whatever the amount VMWare is asking for.

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#20

In my case, my current SSD is partitioned in

  1. /dev/sbd1 (partition type: EFI System) - 537 MB
  2. /dev/sbd2 (partition type: Linux LVM) - 512 GB

And remember my system a HP Z620 Workstation with 64 GB DDR3 ECC, three SSD drives

  1. for Windows 10 Pro (Samsung 850 Evo) 250 GB
  2. for Zorin OS (Samsung 840 Pro) 512 GB
  3. for VMs, one Windows 8.1 Pro (Samsung 860 Evo) 250 GB
  4. 1 TB WD Black (data)
  5. 2 TB WD Enterprise (data)

I dual boot at this moment and I received some warning that I may have to replace my Zorin OS drive.

So I may have to follow your instruction but I also may have to clone my current ZorinOS install to another fresh SSD.

@FrenchPress @swarfendor437 what tool would you guys recommend for cloning ?

#21

Clonezilla but it's been a while since I used it and should also point out never had an SSD and probably never will. So when spindle drives are no longer available my computing days will be over.

#22

Virt manager uses hypervisor. I was just giving an alternative to VM ware. Its been years since I tried VM Ware Player. I switched from VB to Virt Player as you don't need to press right Ctrl to release the mouse to desktop mode on adjacent monitor. You also have to remember that if you created VMs with peripherals present in the details it won't run if they are not present, e.g., thumb drives.

#23

No luckily I have not