Category: Virtualization / KVM / VirtualBox / xenserver

Yes… … well… YESSS finally it works! BUT! IT’S VERY BUGGY! programs crash now and then… so it’s not “production” ready. … the foxlet approach worked 😀 (also got stuck in the last minute of setup of mojave… but after […]

one fine day, THE USER needed to run a windows program… because it’s only available for windows. so fired up the Win 10 KVM VM and installed the program, because it took ages, let it run in the background… the […]

if the spice tools are installed, clipboard sharing between host and guest (copy & pasting text and even images (!)) should (!) work 😀 What is not working virtualbox-easy-style (yet) is easy-host-to-guest-and-vice-versa-file-transfer (which IS VERY ANNOYING (RedHat are you listening? […]

snapshots are stored inside the qcow2 harddisk file of the vm, which is good in terms of “simple”, just one file, where in virtualbox there is the disk.vdi and snapshots are stored in a separate folder as separate files. when […]

Especially important: how fast does existing x86 software (as virtualmachine or docker container) can be run on very energy efficient ARM SoC? Apple already demostrated that with their M1/M2 (soon M3?) ARM based chip designs (congratz!) it is possible to […]

In search for alternatives, decided to test drive “gnome boxes“, which is said, to be an easy-going gui for the libvirt qemu virtualization system. lsb_release -d; # tested on Description: Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye) su – root apt update # […]

virt-manager Links: run search: https://dwaves.de/?s=kvm GNU Linux Debian 10/11/Ubuntu – how to install kvm virtualization (qemu) – basic virsh commands – kvm cheat sheed – howto workaround virt-manager “emulator may not have search permissions for the path”

make sure guest additions are installed (on the guest vm) it is a simple matter of the user not being in group “vboxsf” and thus denied usage of vbox filesystem service (fs) lsb_release -a; # tested on guest Description: Debian […]

not employed by Oracle in any kind, the only advantage VirtualBox (still) has over all the other virtualization systems: was designed to be cross OS from the start and does that pretty well. Holy Crap! Google (crazy guys) ported KVM […]

# if the user wants to be converted from VirtualBox to kvm # 1. first clone the VirtualBox vm into a new vm (to consolidate all snapshots into one vdi # 2. convert file format qemu-img convert -f vdi -O […]

lsb_release -a; # tested with Distributor ID: Debian Description: Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye) Release: 11 Codename: bullseye su – root wget https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/6.1.32/virtualbox-6.1_6.1.32-149290~Debian~bullseye_amd64.deb sha512sum 7e977fde8a2fc370d7df24f761e75eced308ea17037113db877bd799abec4a3a9b6324fcbfda2d2a67d63fbe23b822abbd36ab0f9af4fc5c352df04a97dbe550 # needs to be dpkg installed manually # install requirements apt update && apt upgrade apt […]

with virt-manager, it is a breeze to select the PCI device (in this case enp3s0 NIC) for pass through to guest vm, in case the vm shall get it’s very own dedicated nic: notice: the passed NIC dissapears from the […]

it is actually like this, in virt-manager, that chipset and bios can only be changed during first setup “begin installation” it then is fixed and can not be changed in virt-manager

let’s say: in theory – it works in reality – there are (currently) massive sata harddisk driver problems between esxi 6.7 and kvm-qemu’s virtual harddisk admin-user know: esxi is hardware picky (Dell bought VMWare in 2004 so, “officially” only Dell […]

a bit of a warning: this script is a bit of hardcore kvm “hacking” that might (sometimes) not work (kvm is under heavy development), wish to kvm and virsh-manager developers: please please integrate an easy way (like in virtualbox) for […]

hostnamectl; # tested on Static hostname: lenovo Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster) Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-17-amd64 Architecture: x86-64 # with virsh –version 5.0.0 libvirtd –version libvirtd (libvirt) 5.0.0 /usr/bin/kvm –version QEMU emulator version 3.1.0 (Debian 1:3.1+dfsg-8+deb10u8) Copyright (c) 2003-2018 Fabrice […]

“thin provisioning” means “virtually” allocate more harddisk space, than the harddisk (physically) has, then grow the virtual harddisk file according to it’s needs (store more files = size of harddisk.img grows dynamically) # debian 10; # tested via bash terminal: […]

the error message basically means: the VM’s screen can not be auto-resized because the VBoxGuestAdditions kernel module drivers software was not properly build & installed. the solution: rebuild & reinstall the VBoxGuestAdditions (kernel module) properly: hostnamectl; # tested on guest […]

so RedHat developed the virsh manager, but not qemu itself. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43704856/what-are-the-differences-between-qemu-and-virtualbox QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer. When used as a machine emulator, QEMU can run OSes and programs made for one machine (e.g. an […]

hostnamectl; # tested on Static hostname: hpServerG6 Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster) Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-12-amd64 Architecture: x86-64 su – root; apt update; apt install qemu-kvm libvirt-clients libvirt-daemon-system bridge-utils virtinst libvirt-daemon virt-manager # give non-root user kvm access (it might […]

btw: love kvm (used by very large companies) just as virtualbox (oracle) the task: over the years a windows vm is using up massive amounts of precious server harddisk space (snapshots before everyupdate) all the snapshots now add up to […]

update 2022: next to the good old (non-destructive if used correctly) “dd” is still the way to go for benchmarking harddisks under GNU Linux. a simpler one is “gnome-disk-utility” also interesting but not very simple in installation & usage (complicated! […]

i really like virtualbox and i think it has great potential, what i do not like SOOO much is the CIA’s involvement with Oracle. “Larry Ellison Is A Billionaire Today Thanks To The CIA” (src) VirtualBox is mostly GPL 2.0 […]

in addition to select “IDE emulate” in VM Settings one should also restart 1) client 2) server 3) vm  

sometimes one wants to restart a windows vm every x days – to clean up RAM and Co. run task scheduler “Aufgabenplanung” %windir%\system32\taskschd.msc /s File/Datei -> New/Neu -> Basic Task/Einfache Aufgabe select or copy paste: %SystemRoot%\System32\shutdown.exe one has to scroll […]

running esxi inside virtualbox vm is just a test, to play with it, unfortunately one will not be able to start vms on it, because of the lack of nested virtualization. (could/should work nested inside quemu-kvm?) the problem: should have […]

Update: kvm is also a good alternative, but only on linux hosts, so if the user plans to move vms between linux and windows hosts, virtualbox is the way to go. Update: 2020-02: VirtualBox 6.1 is available in repository “Debian […]

# setup log of VirtualBox Graphical User Interface Version 6.0.10 r132072 (Qt5.7.1) # on Debian 9.8 with Cinnamon Desktop # go into software repo user@debian98:~$ cd /software/ # download latest version of software user@debian98:/software$ wget https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/6.0.10/virtualbox-6.0_6.0.10-132072~Debian~stretch_amd64.deb –2019-08-03 14:36:05– https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/6.0.10/virtualbox-6.0_6.0.10-132072~Debian~stretch_amd64.deb Resolving […]

usually host-shared-folder get auto-mounted during boot via vboxsf kernel module. symptoms: # manually mounting the by-host-shared-folder “projects” # as user with uid 1000 and groupid 1000, results in: mount -t vboxsf -o uid=1000,gid=1000 projects /media/sf_projects # also try: mount -t […]

Short stoy: AltGr (HostKey) + C will quit “seamless (no menues) mode” really like the cross-os capabilties of virtualbox (possible to move vms between GNU Linux and Windows servers) and think it has great potential, what is not so great […]