libvirt & VirtualBox (get some experience)

[Jorge Fábregas]

Hello everyone,

I'm on Fedora 14 and I'm totally new to libvirt. I have experience with 
vSphere on servers and VirtualBox on the desktop.  I'm looking forward 
to KVM but my desktop CPU doesn't have the virtualization extensions so 
I can't play with KVM at the moment.
However, I would like to get some hands-on experience with the 
management tools (command line virsh and the GUI virt-manager).

Can I really use these mgmt tools with VirtualBox as the back-end 
virtualization engine? That is, can I totally control my VirtualBox VMs 
(with libvirt) without needing to use the VirtualBox GUI at all?

Thanks,
Jorge

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Sun, Jan 09, 2011 at 11:33:00AM -0400, Jorge Fábregas wrote:
>  Hello everyone,
>  
>  I'm on Fedora 14 and I'm totally new to libvirt. I have experience with 
>  vSphere on servers and VirtualBox on the desktop.  I'm looking forward 
>  to KVM but my desktop CPU doesn't have the virtualization extensions so 
>  I can't play with KVM at the moment.
>  However, I would like to get some hands-on experience with the 
>  management tools (command line virsh and the GUI virt-manager).
>  
>  Can I really use these mgmt tools with VirtualBox as the back-end 
>  virtualization engine? That is, can I totally control my VirtualBox VMs 
>  (with libvirt) without needing to use the VirtualBox GUI at all? 
In theory you could use a virtualbox URL to control virtualbox
from libvirt / virt-manager:

http://libvirt.org/drvvbox.html

In practice this is not very well tested.  You might find it better to
try out virtualization using software emulation (qemu).  qemu and KVM
share the same libvirt driver so the experience will be essentially
the same.  It's slow, but not unusably so.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
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[Jorge Fábregas]

On 01/09/2011 11:36 AM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>   You might find it better to try out virtualization using software 
>   emulation (qemu).  qemu and KVM share the same libvirt driver
>   so the experience will be essentially the same.  It's slow, but not
>   unusably so. 
Thanks Richard.  I never thought about that (qemu).  I'll then play with
it since performance is not an issue here. I just want to try out the
tools and get used to them until I buy my next desktop machine (and
eventually use KVM).

Thanks for the tip!

All the best,
Jorge