Virtual machine efficiency

• Vagrant

  115 25,852 9.0 Ruby

  Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing development environments.

  

While UTM is much better at resource usage, it's not perfect. Virtualbox seems to emulate more of a system instead of passing it through to the hypervisor and so is better for running more unusual OSes. I have two VMs there running Illumos which I have yet to figure out how to boot in UTM. A problem that I think is related to UTM's greater use of the hypervisor is that you can't suspend and resume VMs that use it instead of being emulated, so I've still got a few VMs hanging around in Virtualbox which spend most of their time suspended. Finally, what stops me from using UTM at work is that you can't use it as a Vagrant provider. This is incredibly annoying, as the lack of a decent virtualization application makes the otherwise very nice M1 Macs nothing more than pretty toys. I expect that this glaring lack will be fixed within the next couple of years.

• QEMU

  190 9,277 10.0 C

  Official QEMU mirror. Please see https://www.qemu.org/contribute/ for how to submit changes to QEMU. Pull Requests are ignored. Please only use release tarballs from the QEMU website.

  

Until very recently I used Virtualbox for this, mostly because back when I started running VMs on a Mac it was the best free game in town. But it's not the most efficient and I have now switched to the much better, and still free, UTM, which is a simple GUI wrapper around the notoriously hard to configure QEMU, patched to use Apple's hypervisor.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• omnios-build

  8 85 9.6 Shell

  Build system for OmniOS

  

While UTM is much better at resource usage, it's not perfect. Virtualbox seems to emulate more of a system instead of passing it through to the hypervisor and so is better for running more unusual OSes. I have two VMs there running Illumos which I have yet to figure out how to boot in UTM. A problem that I think is related to UTM's greater use of the hypervisor is that you can't suspend and resume VMs that use it instead of being emulated, so I've still got a few VMs hanging around in Virtualbox which spend most of their time suspended. Finally, what stops me from using UTM at work is that you can't use it as a Vagrant provider. This is incredibly annoying, as the lack of a decent virtualization application makes the otherwise very nice M1 Macs nothing more than pretty toys. I expect that this glaring lack will be fixed within the next couple of years.

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