Exploring VirtualBox alternatives

I’ve been exploring alternatives to VirtualBox recently. I wanted to compare virtualisation applications to discover if there was anything better than VirtualBox for my needs. I have been using VirtualBox for about 10 years now and it is almost perfect - it does the job, offers the stability I need and just works. My only complaint is that it does not support dynamic RAM. When you run a virtual machine with 4GB of RAM, it grabs the entire allocation for the machine and holds on to it for the duration, depriving the host of the entire 4GB.

Boxes

I tested Gnome Boxes and that lasted about 20 minutes. As with most (all) Gnome software, there is not much to see there. It works but when it comes to wanting to make any tweaks, it has no options to configure. So, this is just a glorified front-end for QEMU/KVM and a bit of libvirt mixed in there. It’s straight-forward to use — start and stop — and that’s it. What about if I want to change something? No can do. And that’s why my test lasted just 20 minutes. It is pretty to look at but there is not much substance to it. Next.

Virtual Machine Manager

This one is rocket science. I compare it to putting together bare metal but entirely in software, which can be challenging. It picked up my existing VirtualBox Windows machine straight from the VDI file and ran it without issue, albeit with a few complaints about permissions (it likes to keep everything in /var/lib/libvirt/images/ and with the correct user permissions). I installed Spice to get the graphics running smoothly and while it was mostly “OK”, the experience was not as seamless as using VirtualBox.

The one good thing about virt-manager is the ability to set a minimum amount of RAM at startup. If the machine’s cap is 4GB for example, it is easy to specify that you only want it to start with 1GB minimum. It will chug along and then use up the rest of its allocation when required, which I find amazing.

I attempted to create a new machine and that went terribly. Like I mentioned, this is rocket science. There are so many considerations to make and additional installs just to get a decent-looking virtual machine which can load the installation ISO that the whole process kills the fun. Comparing my first attempt here to my first attempt in VirtualBox all those years ago, this was torturous. And oh, if one wants shared folders from the host, another add on is required (in addition to the one already added for smooth-ish graphics).

I left, disappointed with my meagre efforts and uninstalled this monster.

VirtualBox

Despite lacking the ability to deploy dynamic RAM, VirtualBox is very easy to setup and use. All that is required on a new virtual machine is Guest Additions and that is enough to experience smooth graphics as well as the shared folder functionality. It’s an all-in-one, no mess, no fuss and it stays out of my way.

Do I really need the magic of dynamic RAM? No, not really. While it is a “nice-to-have”, it is not essential for me. I can see dynamic RAM being useful for applications where a host is running several virtual machines which need to stay up constantly. For my needs though, I tend to spin up a virtual machines when I need to test something or when I need to use Photoshop in Windows. I’m generally in-and-out.

I’ll stick here for now.