ZDNET's Jack Wallen says Virt-Manager is more reliable than VirtualBox on Linux

ZDNET writer Jack Wallen says he has stopped using VirtualBox and switched to Virt-Manager as his preferred virtual machine manager on Linux, calling it a better and more reliable option. Wallen describes repeated failures with VirtualBox — at times he could not create virtual machines and has had to perform purge reinstalls, with error messages that proved unhelpful.

He notes KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is built into the Linux kernel and uses hardware virtualization like Intel VT and AMD-V, offering near-native performance, and that Virt-Manager is a graphical front end for KVM that manages virtual machines via libvirt. The article says Red Hat deprecated Virt-Manager in favor of Cockpit for RHEL only, and Wallen writes that he does not find Cockpit a viable VM management solution.

He acknowledges Virt-Manager has a slightly steeper learning curve — for example, using storage pools to control VM disk locations — but that it defaults to bridged networking and, in his experience, is now as easy to use as VirtualBox while being far more reliable and delivering near-native performance.

Wallen points out Virt-Manager is free and easy to install, and reproduces the installation commands for Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch-based distributions, along with instructions to enable libvirtd and possibly add the user to the libvirt group.

Key Topics

Tech, Virt-manager, Kvm, Virtualbox, Libvirt, Red Hat