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Comment by luisgbm | Hacker News Reader

What alternatives do you recommend?

I've been using KVM with virt-manager UI (and virsh). Simple, solid, production ready, 100% free software. PCIe and USB passthrough work fine.

Having ran my home (and work) lab environments with many different virtualization systems, in the end, I always keep coming back to VMware. ESXi in particular. These days, with GPU pass-through, you can make it a workstation and a server at the same time. It's free for personal use and it's rock solid.

In the same vein, Proxmox is another choice, it's open source (or you can pay for support), also allows for GPU pass-through.

XenServer would be another similar choice that supports GPU passthrough. Depends a lot on what you're used to.

Proxmox is a management layer over LVM (and LXC), not a different virtualization technology.

I assume you mean KVM. Yes it's based on existing technologies, I wouldn't necessarily call it just a management layer however.

Any idea if one can emulate different versions of OpenGL too? I'm trying to figure out a sustainable way to test across versions without needing a lot of hardware.

KVM and libvirt also support GPU pass through.

The last time I looked into this, it was for running Linux VMs on my 2017 MacBookPro. I went with VMWare Fusion, and I've been pretty happy with it.

I'm not sure if there's a better option today, and/or for different host/guest combos.

Fusion has been amazing in my experience. Never had issues with my VMs being sluggish like with VirtualBox. Plus 100% compatibility with Workstation for transferring VMs between Windows/Linux and Mac hosts. Annoying that they have a paid upgrade yearly, but I’ll gladly accept that because the alternative is giving Oracle money. Older versions usually hold up fine for a few years anyway, so long as newer Windows or Linux releases don’t break anything.

Are there any other cross-platform virtualization platforms nowadays? I need something to run Vagrant on that my team can use on mac, windows, and Linux. Ideally all using the same hypervisor, so I don't need to have 3 different sets of documentation for each thing..

VMWare. I know, I know, proprietary bad and all that, but for just getting stuff done with minimal fuss and not yak-shaving (like, say, vagrant), vmware is good.

I think the real benefit of vagrant is that you don’t need to all use the same hypervisor.

Maybe some little tweaks here and there to target specific ones in the vagrantfile, but otherwise I’ve found it to be largely a non issue to have different hypervisors, so long as you have a base box that supports all the ones you want to use (which is part of why my company builds base boxes - to have something reliable for client projects - either used as is, or where appropriate building on top of our box setup process to make customised boxes)

windows and linux have native solutions, for macos there's vmware and parallels, but really, virtualbox is fine too, unless your are this big company with hundreds of deployments and have to think hard about licensing.

Anything free or inexpensive?

virtualbox is fine (but don't know your needs exactly).

If you're running Linux, virt-manager works fine for a lot of scenarios.

If you want to provision a server as a VM host, Proxmox free version is pretty good but you have to manually update it.

I've been running Multipass [0] by Canonical for the past few months and it has been great.

[0] https://multipass.run/

Big caveat: multipass does not support bridged networking so you can't configure your VM as just another server on a local network. See this issue:

https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/multipass/issues/118

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