[fedora-virt] General Virtualization Questions

[Markus Armbruster]

"Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones at redhat.com> writes:

> On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 07:18:42AM -0400, Jorge Fábregas wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I'm new to KVM (just got a CPU with VT-x support) so now I can finally
>> use QEMU/KVM properly.  I'm using Fedora 14.  Yes I know it's not
>> supported; I promise I won't ask for issues I'll encounter until I
>> upgrade to F18 when it comes out :)  (and then I'll face GNOME 3...)
>> 
>> Right now I've been playing with a Windows XP VM and so far so good; I
>> love the performance.  Since my previous experience was with VMware
>> Workstation/Player & VirtualBox I've got some general questions
>> regarding virtualization (from the point of view of a desktop user):
>> 
>> 1) Is there an equivalent of "VMware Tools"/"Guest Additions"? I noticed
>> there's an ISO with the paravirtualized drivers (VirtIO) but I'm
>> wondering: If you're not using any of those paravirtualized drivers: is
>> there anything to be installed on the guest in order to integrate it
>> more with the host?
>
> To rephrase the question as "is there anything like the smooth
> integration that VMware Tools / VirtualBox gives you?" then the answer
> is no.  Virtio is aimed at performance; in general most of the tools
> are aimed at using and deploying virtual machines as servers, where
> fancy UI integration across virtual desktops isn't important; but
> maximum performance, ease of massive deployment, scripting, cloud
> etc. are important.
>
>> 2) What's the standard method you guys use to transfer files between the
>> guest & the host?  Is drag & drop supported with Spice these days?  Do
>> you recreate the "Shared Folder" thing (like VirtualBox) using Samba on
>> the host? or do you loop mount the VM disk image when the guest is down?
>
> Similar to the previous answer, but you can do this using Dropbox,
> Samba, NFS, etc.  Just treat VMs the same as networked machines and
> you won't go far wrong.

Add to the list: 9p (Plan 9 folder sharing over Virtio).  Haven't gotten
around to trying it myself, but it sounds like it could address (some
of) Jorge's needs.

http://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/9psetup

[...]