On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 6:15 AM, David Sommerseth
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Joseph Areeda" <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Sent: Tuesday, 2 October, 2012 12:33:59 AM
>> Subject: The opposite SL and VirtualBox problem
>>
>> I want to run Windows as a guest system on my Sl6.3 box.
>>
>> Installing vbox from the Oracle repository gives me an error trying
>> to
>> create the kernel modules.
>
> Just a silly question.  Why bother with VirtualBox when you have KVM built into the OS?  Using the SPICE protocol (yum search spice) and you'll even get a decent console performance.  And it's really easy to setup and configure using virt-manager.
>
>
> kind regards,
>
> David Sommerseth

I can answer that one. I'm working with KVM professionally, and do
code development in Virtualbox environments. The libvirt toolkit core
to KVM management, lauded in its development as a way to manage all
the different virtualization toolkits, was designed by monkeys who
thought they were writing a play for Hamlet. It violates *every single
one* of Eric Raymond's published guidelines for open source
interfaces, in his old "Luxury of Ignorance" essay, and it especially
violates the extra guidelines I sent Eric and which he added to that
essay as a postscript.

I can think of other tools that are that bad, but it's not easy.

When I am on a remote connection with limited bandwidth, and I need to
add or modify hardware configurations for a VM, I *do not want* to
have to run the graphics console of the VM simply in order to add a
network port. The virt-manager tool got this *dead wrong*.

Oh, and did I forget to mention that if your X setup is not just
right, "virt-manager" fails to start completely silently? It doesn't
evem check if your "DISPLAY" is set and send an appropriate error
message?

KVM also has very serious problems with network configuration. The
necessary "bridged" network configuration for VM's that are not going
to be behind a NAT or completely isolated is not actually supported by
any of our upstream vendor's configuration tools. You have to hand
edit your core network configuration files with a text editor, and any
use of NetworkManager to manage VPN  or wireless connections puts you
at risk of breaking it unless you very rigorously and manually put
'NM_CONTROLLED=no' in each /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-*
file.

It is a very, very steep learning curve to get your first KVM setups
working, where with VirtualBox it's very plug and play. VirtualBox is
unlikely to have the high scalability, live server migration, or
kernel integration that KVM has, but for a casual virtual machine or
two running common operating systems on common architectures, who
cares?