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Desktop hypervisors are like buses: none for ages, then four at once

(2024/09/17)


September has been a big month for desktop hypervisors, with the field's big players all delivering significant updates.

Oracle delivered VirtualBox version 7.1, [1]billed as a major upgrade thanks to its implementation of a UI with a "modernized look and feel, offering a selection between Basic and Experienced user level with reduced or full UI functionality."

Oracle had previously referred to "Expert" mode, but it is unclear if the change in language is truly significant.

[2]

The new release also allows cuts of Linux and BSD coded for the Arm architecture to run on macOS hosts.

[3]

[4]

Cloning VMs from the desktop into the Oracle cloud is another option, and the desktop hypervisor can then report on resource usage of cloudy VMs. Which will be handy, as sending a monster VM to the cloud where it burns budget will not be welcome.

Parallels also released a desktop hypervisor update last week. Version 20 of the eponymous tool now offers a VM that's packed with tools developers may find handy as they work on generative AI applications. Among those tools are the Docker community edition, lmutils, the OpenCV computer vision library, and the Ollama chatbot interface for AI models.

[5]

"You can try to use pretty much any model that fits into your Mac resources," Parallels has advised, adding that sample apps available in the VM have been tested with Google's Gemma2:2b model, Microsoft's Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct-gguf, Reach-vb's Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-Q6_K-GGU, and TheBloke's Llama-2-7b-Chat-GGUF and OpenHermes-2.5-Mistral-7B-GGUF. The product can handle guests running macOS Sequoia and Windows 11 24H2.

[6]Broadcom has brought VMware down to earth and that’s welcome

[7]Veeam debuts its Proxmox backup tool – and reveals outfit using it to quit VMware

[8]Xen Project in a pickle as colo provider housing test platform closes

[9]Xen hypervisor quadruples its possible core count for version 4.19

Desktop hypervisors are often used by developers, and Parallels seems to have acknowledged that with a new management portal that brings single sign-on to the product. Volume licensing is another addition.

The other big player in desktop hypervisors is VMware, with its Fusion and Workstation products for macOS and Windows respectively.

Both were recently updated. Workstation reached [10]version 17.6 and added vmcli – a command line tool that allows users to interact with the hypervisor directly from a Linux or macOS terminal, or the Windows command prompt.

"With vmcli, you can perform a variety of operations such as creating new virtual machines, generating VM templates, powering on VMs, and modifying various VM settings. Additionally, you can also create scripts to run multiple commands sequentially," according to the product's [11]changelog .

[12]

Fusion reached version 13.6, and also gained vmcli . Release notes can be found [13]here . ®

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[1] https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog-7.1#v00

[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/virtualization&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZulTRLA7mVza7KZjFwg67gAAAog&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/virtualization&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZulTRLA7mVza7KZjFwg67gAAAog&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/virtualization&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZulTRLA7mVza7KZjFwg67gAAAog&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/virtualization&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZulTRLA7mVza7KZjFwg67gAAAog&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[6] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/vmware_explore_strategy_analysis/

[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/02/veeam_proxmox_support_arrives/

[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/11/xen_project_colo_testing/

[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/01/xen_4_19/

[10] https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Workstation-Pro/17.6/rn/vmware-workstation-176-pro-release-notes/index.html#Release-Note-Section-13534

[11] https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Workstation-Pro/17.6/rn/vmware-workstation-176-pro-release-notes/index.html#Release-Note-Section-13534

[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/virtualization&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZulTRLA7mVza7KZjFwg67gAAAog&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[13] https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Fusion/13.6/rn/vmware-fusion-136-release-notes/index.html#Release-Note-Section-13575

[14] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/


Groo The Wanderer

So the "major upgrade" for VirtualBox is just window dressing? There's no new functionality to report on?

Or is this just a case of lazy reporting?

AMBxx

It's Oracle - probably something hidden in the licence conditions.

AlexV

ARM support is fairly major. Not necessarily interesting if you don't need it, but not unworthy of a .x version bump. Similarly for IPv6 support, important if you wanted it, I guess.

thames

I'm in the middle of replacing a Virtual Box set up for software testing on a desktop with KVM, and so far everything has been going well. All of the functionality that I used in Virtual Box is present in KVM, and KVM has some features that I am digging into to see if they make life easier than was the case with Virtual Box.

I had been procrastinating on this project for a while, but VB had become too unreliable (e.g. would stop working after an OS update and it would take a long time for Oracle to come out with a fix) so I finally found the motivation to do it. So far it has been going very smoothly and I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner.

For software testing I have an automated system which starts the VM, uploads the software via SSH, compiles it, runs the tests and benchmarks, downloads the results, checks the results, and then goes on to the next OS target.

For this you need a command line interface to the VM so you can script the whole process. With VirtualBox this is "VBoxManage", with KVM this is "virsh". Everything that I used in VBoxManage has an equivalent in virsh that works more or less the same way. So "VBoxManage startvm " and "virsh start " do the same thing, etc. Some of the commands may be a bit different (I can't recall exactly), but not to a degree which would make any real difference in usability.

I don't have experience doing this with VMWare Workstation, so I'm a little surprised to read that they have apparently just introduced "vmcli". I was pretty sure they had something called vmrun which did the same thing, or was that something else, or did it just have limited functionality?

Hyper-V Type1

UkSingh

These are all Type2 hypervisors with an additional software layer on top of the desktop OS.

Hyper-V (which has been included in all Windows Professional editions since Windows 10) is a Type1 hypervisors giving VMs much better performance than Type2.

If you are running Windows Professional/Enterprise it's definitely worth trying first

Re: Hyper-V Type1

AMBxx

I'd be interested to know why someone downvoted you. I've not used a Type 2 Hypervisor for over 15 years. Certainly, in the Windows world there's no need for these type 2 things with all the extra overhead and weird networking.

Re: Hyper-V Type1

thames

These are "desktop hypervisors", just as it says in the title. This fills a different use case than a server.

They're often used by for example software developers who want to test on different operating systems or OS versions without setting up separate hardware. You would fire up the VM, run your tests, and shut it down again. Most of the time you don't have a VM running at all.

Another use case is where you have one Windows program that you need to run occasionally on say Linux. In the old days you would dual-boot. These days you would run it in a VM, as and when you needed it.

In these use cases the minor efficiency differences between different hypervisor types is irrelevant in practical terms. Furthermore, modern hypervisors provide special virtualisation drivers which simply pass through I/O requests instead of emulating hardware, so there's very little efficiency lost there.

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