DistroTube: You're never going to find the perfect distro... Me: boots up Hannah Montana linux...

I use Virtualbox because it provides a consistent experience across Windows, Mac and Linux hosts.

Goodbye , virt-manager. Hello , virsh :)

The performance difference between KVM and virtualbox is massive. Even vmware is slower than KVM. The only problem with KVM is the lack of 3D acceleration in Windows guests, but there are ways to minimise the impact. On Linux guests, 3D works so there's no need to even bother with alternative solutions.

These days VMs are more limited by their virtual video card performance rather than CPU.

Absolutely the best demo. Now I want to go back to Pop...I do so love the UI. Thanks for this video. So good. Big fan of virt.

Derek, thank you for this video and for your really important explanation! I've never heard of virt-manager before, so I will try it out und I will see if it's better working than VB! Thank you for explaining the commands which are necessary for working with virt-manager!

Very cool introduction, Derek. Thank you for all your work.

Excellent video. I am glad you put the commands in the description.

THANK YOU for actually talking through what each piece of software is for and why, instead of just saying "install this this and this" like so many other people would have done. I always love to learn about how things work instead of "this just works".

The performance of Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVM) has gotten downright unbelievable these days. My CPU is from 2013 I believe. It's not a server CPU either; standard i7 4790-K without overclocking. I literally cannot tell the difference in performance between my Windows VM vs bare-metal Windows install. (Windows 10 anyway.) Been playing DOOM Eternal at over 100 FPS. In Quake Live I can pull off all the different advanced rocket jumps. You can't pull that shit off unless you have almost no latency. It's truly unbelievable that you can play modern games in a VM with flawless performance. [EDIT] I just wanted to add; iommu (hardware passthrough) used to have audio performance issues. However, if you use the default virtualized audio card (ich9 I believe) the sound is excellent. I get audio hiccups every now and again, but that's just something that happens in video games on my PC running Windows 10. It's literally so good at virtualization, even the bugs are the same! lol [/EDIT]

I could not thank you enough dt for this video. Thank you very much for sharing this awesome knowledge.

can confirm. just switched to kvm too. (with virt-manager) and it's perfect to run Hiren's Boot CD to do HDD/flash drive data recovery

Thanks man....i was looking for a way to get full screen.....you nailed it with xrendr command

Absolutely great video. SO many things to learn from DT

Hey DT! Great video! A little tip, instead of systemctl enable unit ; systemctl start unit you can use systemctl enable --now unit Also, a little doubt that I didn't took too much time to figure out when I was toying with virt-manager. How do you copy from/to the virtual machine? Be it a selected string in st ( so I can paste with the middle button of the mouse ) or a file.

Thanks! Exactly the info I needed.

I've been using virt-viewer for years and love it. Also been using remote-viewer for accessing VMs via SPICE protocol, which has proven to be far more performant than VNC.

I'm not sure why, but wanted to note that in my setup i added my user to libvirt and not libvert"d" Just in case anyone else is having issues with that as well. Arch wiki page notes adding user to libvirt group

virt-manager + spice over ssh is fire af

Nice! I sticked with VMware because of the video resolutions option. While I had previously added custom resolutions under VirtualBox, it's an extra chore per vm that does not really work well when resizing the virtual machine window as it does under VMware. I'll have to give virt-manager a try; thanks a lot for the info!

Straight forward explanation straight on the topic. Thanks Bro.

I always learn a few things tips tricks - by looking over DTs' shoulder. Much Appreciated - Video's are always clear and understandable. ..... Never condescending and you try hard not to talk over peoples heads. Many Thanks.

I was today years old when I learned that you could copy paste text just by clicking the middle mouse button. My life is forever changed.

Good move. Suse have used this for several years and you can turn it on from the yast control centre - sets it all up for you.

This is awesome DT! I have a brand new ArcoLinux install up and running as of this morning after watching your video the other day on installing it. My 1st go didn't work because I didn't want it to over write my Ubuntu Boot menu since it menu boots windows 10 and Knoppix on sdb drive. Multi booting was much easier before efi came on the scene for me anyhow. So now I have it reinstalled with Arco controlling the boot of everything now. That 1st install was not going to work properly any how. The screen size was out of border on the USB menu and it also transferred to the ArcroLinux Install. I did get Acro to boot with SuperGrub2 this morning but soon as I saw the startup script was off the screen I shut it down and wiped it with with gparted in Ubuntu on sda drive and started over. You are a whiz at all this stuff man!😀

You can use gnome boxes for a simple interface to start and use libvirt virtual machines

I was configuring virt-manager (kvm/qemu) when I got the pop-up for this video!

3:40 QEMU also does software emulation of non-native architectures. For example, you can run up virtual ARM, MIPS and a bunch of other architectures for machines on your x86 hardware. Yes, they will be slow because of software-based emulation, but they will run. In fact, for running a native-architecture VM (e.g. x86 on x86), you have to explicitly specify the use of KVM, otherwise it will run its software emulation.

Really surprised how well KVM had grown. Tried it years back and couldn't get it to run. Documentation was sparse..

This was helpful, thanks!

you just gave me the best xmas20 gift! I just started studying all about kvm and my head was spinning around. what a helpful info, THANKU!!

Also just a quick note, VM's are stored in /var, so on systems with partitioned home folders to a separate drive, you may find that your system folder will get filled up quick... I had to partition a separate drive just for "/var" to make sure I did not run out of space.

Runs like hell on my 12 years old Asus P5QD with Q9550! Much different to Virtual Box. Thanks a lot DT!

you can't find perfection unless you make what you see perfect your self

Thanks for covering this. Can you describe your audio/capture equipment that you use? The sound in your videos is awesome! Thanks!

Thanks a lot! Very useful!

I do appreciate your views on VMware. I used to use it way back in 2000 and it helped, I was in the linux testing group that validated Red Hat on the servers that the company I worked for manufactured.. The intranet of this mega-company (now) wouldn't let you log on with Netscape (at the time) you had to log in using IE. We in Linux server test group all ran Linux on our laptops, what ever kind of Linux we wanted to run, so of course we had no access to input our hours, or schedule time off or basically use anything that the company offered. Each one of us would submit a new ticket every week, about not being able to access the employee stuff. Then we would all log into our VMWare instances and run Windows what ever version it was, ad get our time logged for the week. Every day I would go home feeling so unclean because of the compromise that I had just made..... Thanks for this great tutorial on using Virt-manager. I do appreciate it a lot. ( I know that this is a 2+ year old video, but it's still good, applicable, information)

thanks for this, QEMU KVM is the default virtual manager for OpenSUSE TW. I tried using VirtualBox and to my dismay had live CDs freezing on me and the resolution issue. VDI is nice in the sense that it is dynamically assigning the data and not consuming the entire size like qcow2 does.

thx for the video, will give virt manager a chance.

Witnessing the birth of the virt-manager DT duo 😇

Great job. Thank you.

I am with you! I use Virtualbox what is really good and after watch this video I will try kvm. By the way, AWS is going to use kvm in their next generation of EC service.

That's a great video Derek thanks for that!! I was thinking of going this way and you probably just convinced me, the vdi conversion I didn't know about so that's a plus.

Dt, you forgot to mention that virt-manager does not allow to use a dynamic allocated drive in graphical interface, and if you want that it is possible but you have go through the command line. Also, for VMWare users it is possible to use VMWare machines in qemu, and it is much much easier than in virtualbox. I had to do it once for a MIT course in security. One problem I often find in virt-manager is the way in which you share files between host and guest machines. I guess you could do a video on that. Nice video.

Thank you, Derek. I haven't played with VMs for over a decade because I didn't want to use something that came with a EULA.

Very helpful, Thanks

I remember a day when you spoke of a KVM you were refering to a device that would allow you to use a single “Keyboard, Video Monitor, and Mouse” on multiple computers. Originally in ps/2 format and then in USB. Does anyone remember those? I just recently came across this (virtual built into linux kernal) and decided to check out a video for it. Thank you for creating one. This is something I will be checking out as a replacement to VirtualBox because lately vBox for me has been more trouble than I wish to deal with.

Ohh what a nice Arch mug :) Where did you buy?

Amazing video as always sir. Hey just one issue. Im using sort of a similar linux installation with Debian and DWM. I was just going to go ahead and install as you suggest 'lxsession' for the polkit, but is asking me for dependencies in total of 130MB when I attempt to install it. I dont really wanna bloat my installation. Is that all needed?

In virt-manager you can use even 3d acceleration in a VM with help of virtio and virgl by setting display to Spice, listen to None and checking OpenGL also in Video QXL change QXL to Virtio and checking 3D accel iirc Wa-bam, you can now play 3d games inside of VM with good performance (currently not aupported for windows guests, sadly)

awesome video, i was looking for something else to ditch virtualbox

I've actually been looking for a new VM manager because virtual box has been getting slower and slower. Thanks DT

Thank you very much for this video. Can you say if USB 3.0 will work when using Windows XP? We have several commercial software titles that we continue to use in Virtualbox on Windows XP using Ubuntu Mate as host. We haven't been able to change over to USB thumb drives or external drives because Windows XP only supports USB 2.0. Apparently there are some command line tricks to get the Unasis drivers to work but after multiple attempts to run the command we haven't been able to get it working. If Virt-Manager would do it that would be great. Thanks, rcramden.

Great video THank you

Been using virt manager on ubuntu server to run various things including pfsense. I really like virt manager cause since I can't be bothered to walk to the server to control it I can just use it on my desktop and use ssh with key auth to control the vms. It also works on windows if the need to have it arises through xming and wsl

🤣 🤟 Straight forward to the point. I'm new to Virtual Machines & Decided to install Proxmox why, because it's GNU, easy to install, debian based & I trust their stability history, can run both VM & Containers, its Web UI is gd. so far, you can run it from the command line (don''t know how yet), & you can install a DM or WM so you can just run it on a single PC for us mere mortals- my issue is I'm not clear yet how to install a WM to manage Proxmox from the same PC. Guess I'll just have to try & if I break it , I'll reinstall it🙉 You make some of the best reviews & instructional videos, I never have to go blind trying to read & follow your CLI instructions👍 & always learn from your explanations. Sorry you have to work another job, unfortunately I don't have the extra $ to become a Patron. Stay well friend

Haven't even watched the video yet but I liked just because of the title. I've been saying for the last year that this is the much better way to go.

Once again a great and useful guide. Thank you! I had problems with this virtualization process in Arch. Virt-manager installed the virtual drive in my root partition, which was just 40 GB in total, creating disk size errors. I tried to mount this drive in my home partition and I created a huge mess. Does virt-manager always mount virtual drives on the root partition or did I do something wrong?

nice vid men! thanks

you can enable and start in one command with recent systemctl: sudo systemctl --now enable

@DistroTube I noticed I was able to install my win 10 backup .img w/o having to convert it to the virt-manager extension you mentioned. Is there a performance benefit to using that format over others like .img? Can you do an updated video on virt-manager? I'm trying to install updated AMD drivers for my GPU via virt-manager but it doesn't seem to install (keeps seeming to loop during the AMD install pop-up). In any event, thanks for the video.

I'm running kvm since about 6 years on my Dell PowerEdge Server and i never had any problems at all. I have it installed on Ubuntu Server.

Awesome tips! What are those green lines running on the laptop?

Finally :p

He is a bunny. He hoppes everything

Does it work on any linux distro? And also could i use it for gaming if i use linux as my Host OS? 🤔

Hey there, I came across this video for fun of watching (like your others!) and I like your top menu bar the right end side of it. Gives RAM, uptime, # of updates, etc... I'm sure there's more you could plug there. Is that the Polybar? If not what is it? I am not familiar with Arch.

It's about time

I stopped using virtualbox when building from source became a pita, circa the oracle takeover. Libvirt is a wrapper for managing both xen and qemu with the same commands. My bias is to avoid wrappers like that, because it's an extra layer of confusion if something isn't working. But it does appear to be "the standard way," and lots of software (like stuff that mounts qcow2 images on your host machine) uses it anyway.

Dont forget to install spice guest toola on the guest VM! Auto resize and copy paste!

a big benefit of using KVM is the fact that you can do gpu passthrough of normal consumer-grade gpus and use the vm for gaming. I've been doing that for several months and performance is more or less on par with running baremetal.

I told you the same thing 6 months ago and U were a gnome boxes fan boy :D

been waiting for you to join the winning team...

Thanks DT. I am using virt manager for a while, but only to spin not graphical linux machines, usually with vagrant. I tried to install some Linux distros with graphical interface, but having very slow video and audio. Tried different drivers, but no luck so far. Do you install some drivers on the Linux guest?

Virt-manager tends to allocate all the chosen vm disk space (at least for me on Gentoo). If you are running low on disk space, you can use "qemu-img convert" to resize vms to their minimal size. Also, you can use compression with "-c" option, fresh xubuntu weights below 3G with it! I don't think you can set those options through virt-manager GUI.

With at the latest version of qemu and virt-manager you can import VDI and VMDK images directly without needing to convert them. I am running Virt-manager 2.2.1 and qemu 4.2.0 (I believe I was able to do this with the past 1 or 2 versions as well) it allows me to create a new machine using existing images of either format and runs them as such with no conversion to qcow2. Once the file is selected it boots right up just as fast as if it was a qcow2 image.

Great job man , Thank your very much . but why you don't look at the camera ? you have a Great Eyes Color

My experience with Virt-manager was way more rough than Virtualbox one. The requirements to make it working was quite complicated on my MX Linux.

I dont know why I'm watching this. I've used virt-manager for a good long while now.

Thank you for sharing. I would greatly appreciate if you can explain how can I share an extra hard drive (it is already in the desktop) between host and guest (bidirectional) without the hassle of permission(s). Thanks.

the group is not libvirtd but libvirt. Great video again.... sure, libvirt-manager is the best.

Good stuff

I like to point at some misinformation. Both systems run their KVM or KVM type of modules inside the kernel, so there is no difference. However especially the diskio of qemu/kvm is faster, because the design only has to be optimized for Linux! The main advantage of Virtualbox is, that it is one consistent package. You already did show, all the packages you need to get for QEMU/KVM, but on top of that you have to scan the internet for Windows drivers again. For Win 10 you have 2 or 3 Internet sites with drivers, but all are from around 2014. Not all of the options offered by QEMU/KVM will be working, so it is try and error and e.g. 3D acceleration for graphics will not work. In Virtualbox I can activate Windows, when I run the Windows VM on the original PC with the activation sticker. That is impossible with QEMU/KVM. QEMU/KVM chooses a default CPU and they often do not select as default the CPU of the Host. I had to correct it manually, they did not recognize my 4-core Phenom II and insisted on calling it a 2-core Opteron. You can correct the core count, but Phenom II was not in their list of known CPUs. All these problems were for me the reasons to stick to Virtualbox, also because VBox adapts automatically to my screen resolution after I install the Guest Additions. That install only takes ~1-2 minutes. So I would say: - Virtualbox user-friendly and reliable. Well optimized for the desktop. Suitable for professionals and amateurs.. - QEMU/KVM try & error, but faster diskio. Optimized mainly for the server. Suitable for administrators and true hobbyists. I also use Virtualbox, because I can still run VMs installed in 2010! I have Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows XP and both VMs were installed 10 years ago and they went from Pentium 4 to Phenom to Phenom II to Ryzen! Talking about speed, my VBox Linux VMs boot in ~10 seconds from a nvme-SSD and that is great for normal use :) The Host takes 2 seconds more, mainly because it has to initiate the network, while the VMs get that connection ready for use.

OMG 💕

How did u get the batman logo in terminal like that???

you can configure QEMU to emulate PowerPC, so you can run old OSX and AmigaOS, though idk how you do that graphically, would be cool to do a followup on that. Thank you dt, very cool 👍

Thank you

I'd also like to know how you got your version -- mine is 1.5 something.

Hi, with Gnome Boxes there is no easy way of placing your images (VMs) on an external HDD. Can you do it easily with virt-manager? Can you use Gnome-Boxes images or import them? (I guess you could as the only thing that changes is the interface, right?)

virt-manager really good as it got ways to simulate netbook and netboot style virtualizations , that great if don't want to download any iso or want to test out a way of multi-machine server style installs

DT you know that you can manually add any resolution you want right?

I tried but virt-manager show lxc , not qemu/kvm , why and how to solve this? (archlinux)

Since Ubuntu 20.40 3D acceleration works in Linux guests. Xonotic Ultra 1080p 50-60 fps on a RX 460! Not that I use it for gaming, but this means that desktop is much smoother now and there's no difference to a bare metal installation. So, for example if I need to design reports (jasper) the virtual machine is very responsive. A tremendous improvement! I use KVM/QEMU exclusively. No other hypervisors. I hope one day there will be some sort of 3d acceleration for windows guests too.

Why don't you use "xrandr --output Virtual-0 --auto" to change guest resolution automatically?

I would like to play games on Windows XP on virt-manager or Vmware Player? Is this possible without passthrough?

DT do a video on a GPU pass through!

Proxmox is a powerful KVM manager. Web UI. It also allows to run/manage linux containers LXC.

Using LXD Containers means they run at near bare metal speed without virtualization at the hardware level. This means your containers utilize the same kernel as the host OS. LXD runs Quemu/KVM as an alternative to native containers and supports SPICE, etc. You can also pass USB and GPU resources to containers / virtual machines. You could have a dedicated GPU card and pass that straight to a VM that varies from the host GPU. You can use ZFS and other file systems with LXD including Ceph and if you cluster LXD servers you can have high availability fail over and you can move containers between servers. You can remotely manage LXD with LXC command line tool.