KVM/QEMU + Virt-Manager = Good VMware Replacement?

[JeZ-l-Lee]

KVM/QEMU + Virt-Manager = Good VMware Replacement?

Hi,

I am a hobbyist 2D game developer who needs to run Windows 8.1 Pro 64Bit on my host Linux development computer.
I was doing fine until I installed 15.04 and now both VMWare Player and VirtualBox don't work.
I was told in another forum to try something called KVM/QEMU + Virt-Manager.
Would KVM/QEMU + Virt-Manager work OK with Windows 8.1 Pro 64Bit guest virtual machine?
(I would need full OpenGL and D3D hardware accelerated graphic support in the Windows guest)
Let us know, thanks...
(waiting for VMWare to support new 15.04 is taking too long!)

JeZxLee
16BitSoft Inc.
Video Game Design Studio
www.16BitSoft.com

[ronw]

Virtualbox works fine in 15.04 if you are using their repo (I haven't tried the Ubuntu repos).

Oracle doesn't yet have a "Vivid" repo. Just use Utopic.

I played around with Qemu about a month ago. I got Win7 booting, but never got a decent resolution in the guest and gave up. I admittedly didn't try too hard since VB works so well.

[JeZ-l-Lee]

Hi,

Thanks for the response...
I was hoping KVM/QEMU + Virt-Manager was as good as VMWare Player for Linux, guess not.
And for VirtualBox: it works great for Linux guests and Windows XP guests, but not so great with Vista/7/8/10 guests.
The problem is that Windows guest graphic hardware acceleration is "experimental"(and has been for several years now?)
VMWare Player for *ubuntu < 15.04 was perfect for my needs: both OpenGL and D3D graphic technologies worked near flawlessly)

Well, thanks anyway - I'll go back to 14.10 and live with it...

JeZxLee

[bendy]

KVM/QEMU + Virt-Manager = Good VMware Replacement?
(I would need full OpenGL and D3D hardware accelerated graphic support in the Windows guest)
Let us know, thanks...

You won't get OpenGL and D3D support for any guest using KVM/QEMU unfortunately. Passing 3D acceleration to real hardware from a virtual machine is difficult - virtualbox has "experimental" support for this, and I believe there is a way to pass through direct access to the graphics card from a guest OS if you are using xen, but I doubt that is easy or for the inexperienced.

If you doing development work, just dual-boot or have 2 machines and a kvm switch.