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Comment by bradwood | Hacker News Reader

What does this give me that I don't already get from KVM and virt-manager on Linux? Not getting it.

The out-of-the-box performance of Windows in VirtualBox is very good and usually better than virt-manager (Qemu). You can tune Qemu to great performance as well, but it takes some fiddling. VirtualBox is in general very user friendly.

Guest integration (drag'n'drop, clipboard), USB passhthrough and audio support is also top-notch in VBox.

> The out-of-the-box performance of Windows in VirtualBox is very good and usually better than virt-manager (Qemu). You can tune Qemu to great performance as well, but it takes some fiddling. VirtualBox is in general very user friendly.

I haven't found a significative difference but if you have found one and can tune qemu to same level,why don't you share the xml template of your machine to the world and to upstream's virt-manager project?

> Guest integration (drag'n'drop, clipboard), USB passhthrough and audio support is also top-notch in VBox.

These things works well with libvirt too provided you are using the spice-guest-tools.

Not sure about drag'n'drop. Also I've noticed that even when you're aware of the way USB passthrough in virt-manager GUI works that it seems to have some bugs.

I'm mostly interested in if I can use virtualbox accelerated video with kvm because virgl3d seems well behind in that area.

ah yes maybe drag'n'drop is not working I have no idea tbh but I don't remember it working reliably in virtualbox and shared folders always worked better in my limited experience.

Shared folders does indeed seem like a weak point for kvm/virt-manager. There's the virtioFS but this is a pretty recent addition that was also recently pretty buggy on Windows.

I'm not even sure what your alternatives were for this before now, I guess everyone was just using samba.

Until you want to pass a GPU to the VM

With this version of VBox, it's quite possble to pass a GPU to the VM. Have a look at https://www.cyberus-technology.de/products/hypervisor if you want to see a demo.

I virtualize most of my desktop environment. I wanted to go with KVM and virt-manager initially, since I'm mostly using a Linux host and Linux guests, but there were two important features I wanted and couldn't figure out how to get that way: encryption and portability.

Most of the VMs are encrypted, so I feel safe traveling with them. Various secrets are also encrypted, but the encryption of the VMs themselves mean that I don't have to worry about losing my device at an airport and someone else potentially getting access to things they shouldn't. There are schemes that make this work in virt-manager and KVM, but I didn't like any of them as much; I didn't want to rely on the host for filesystem-level encryption (see portability), and I have previously had a bit of trouble with full disk encryption, so I wasn't comfortable relying on that. VirtualBox essentially is also doing full disk encryption, but it's invisible to the guest and seems to be reliable.

For portability, I should be able to use https://www.vbox.me/ to install the VMs and a host onto a flash drive and be able to run any of my environments from any Windows host without additional installations. Haven't actually tried this yet (happily, I no longer have easy access to Windows machines!), but it was a big point in favor.

Most of my environments now get auto-configured through Vagrant: https://github.com/robsheldon/vagrantfiles, so I get some of the benefits of virt-manager that way.

I really don't love relying on Oracle for anything

A decent UI and hopefully support to use virtualbox appliances

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