[Info-vax] VMWARE/ESXi Linux

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 12/2/2024 10:09 PM, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
> Matthew R. Wilson <mwilson at mattwilson.org> wrote:
>> KVM is largely dependent on qemu to provide the rest of the actual
>> virtual system. qemu's a great project and I run a ton of desktop VMs
>> with qemu+KVM, but it just doesn't have the level of maturity or
>> edge-case support that ESXi does. Pretty much any x86 operating system,
>> historical or current, _just works_ in ESXi.  With qemu+KVM, you're
>> going to have good success with the "big name" OSes...Windows, Linux,
>> the major BSDs, etc., but you're going to be fighting with quirks and
>> problems if you're trying, say, old OS/2 releases. That's not relevant
>> for most people looking for virtualization solutions, and the problems
>> aren't always insurmountable, but you're claiming that KVM is a "better"
>> solution, whereas in my experience, in reality, ESXi is the better
>> technology.
> 
> What you wrote is now very atypical use: faithfully implementing
> all quirks of real devices.  More typical case is guest which
> knows that it is running on a hypervisor and uses virtual
> interface with no real counterpart.  For this quality of
> virtual interfaces matters.  I do not know how ESXi compares
> to KVM, but I know that "equivalent" but different virtual
> interfaces in qemu+KVM may have markedly different performance.

Are you talking about paravirtual drivers?

To get back to VMS then I don't think VMS got any of those.

Arne