[fedora-virt] libvirt & VirtualBox (get some experience)

[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
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