Virtualization for home use?

Question

Iron

There was an idea to get on a computer some virtual machines. Conditionally: for work (*nix), for the Internet and entertainment (win), for operations with payment systems and online banks (paranoia of fashion) and a couple more. It seems convenient to quickly switch between them, maintenance, the ability to take snapshots, etc. I began to study the issue, but there were only more questions. I hope for competent people.

1. Intel vs AMD. Wikipedia talks about the advantage of amd in hardware virtualization, but the info is from 2006, how are things now?
2. How much performance drops during virtualization (with different VMMs, I suppose)? It seems that I know how to search, but Google does not want to give out anything except verbiage, where are the tables with measurements? There are, however, a couple of articles, but there are heated debates about testing methodology.
3. Which is better - host OS + vmm from under it, or only VMM + virtual machines? (I heard that at least xen and virtualbox can do this). Better is two criteria: usability and performance, in relation to my requests.
4. Can I play under a virtual machine? This, of course, is not about the scarf. If there are several video cards, will they be forwarded? How about SLI/Crossfire?
5. Are there any recommendations for hardware?
6. What are the ways of communication between machines other than the network. Can VMM provide, for example, copy-paste between VMs? At least the text. What about shared drives? It is clear that you can use network ones, but these are extra costs, suddenly VMM allows you to implement balls better.
7. What is the preferred VMM for my requests? A bit of a dumb question, yes.

Answer 1

I had the same question.
Hardware: Intel Xeon E-1245V2, 32GB Ram, Asrock Z77 Fatal1ty Professional (it could have been Z77 Performance), for now 2 1TB hard drives, two Gigabyte Radeon HD 7770 video cards.
Why Asrock Z77 Fatal1ty Professional - initially planned for each virtual machine its own ssd. But for it to work correctly (TRIM), you need to select the entire SATA controller. Asrock has 3. I haven't installed an SSD yet, I'm thinking of installing it for a web server.
There is also support for VT-d, which is necessary for forwarding video cards to a guest OS.
Virtualization software: Xen Cloud Platform 1.6.
About hardware: at first I chose the Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H motherboard, but with VT-d enabled, both Marvell SATA controllers do not work.
Percent in embedded video - as a result, I have 3 video cards, 2 for guest operating systems, one (built-in) for the hypervisor. It seems like it can be forwarded to the guest axis, but I have not tried it (and maybe I won’t even).
As a result: so far 2 guest operating systems (so far 8GB ram) with their own video card, and their own 1TB hard (virtual disks were made, perhaps it was necessary to forward them to the state axis, and share it there already), each shows the same built-in rating: 7.7 percent , memory 7.7, video 7.5, game graphics 7.5, disk 5.9.
The CPU is loaded by 10% -20% during normal operation, during the game (with normal settings, depends on the game) on one virtual machine - 2-3 cores out of 8 (threads?) work in the range of 40-90%.
I have one workplace located in the next room (:, 10m HDMI, 10m USB 2.0 (active) are stretched there, and a USB HUB is installed there with a separate power supply for connecting a keyboard, mouse, flash drives and other nonsense, sound via HDMI-> output to monitor.
When forwarding the USB controller, there is a nuance - 0000:00:1d the controller did not connect USB devices via a 10m cable via 2.0, only 1.1. Changed it to 0000:00:1a - everything worked. Without a 10m extension cable, everything works without problems.
Plans: put a web server on an SSD (with forwarding a separate SATA controller), a couple more hard drives for backups and a file server Doubtful
: Move the hypervisor to the CF through the IDE-CF controller so that it is not tied to the hard drive.

Answer 2

do not count for a corpse eater that I am raising old topics, but as I see subscribers are still in the ranks, information may be needed.
fully agree with valdiksat the expense of XCP virtualization. Exactly the same thing I did myself. First you need to prepare a platform for this whole thing. I have 2 ssd hard drives and 4 regular ones on a separate controller. There is a desire to make one mouse for both systems, sharing the same files, and in general, so that there is a feeling of working on one computer. The operating systems I'm interested in are Windows 7 and Mint. For each system, it is desirable to allocate a separate video card, for this I had a motherboard with 2 PCIE16 and an integrated processor in Intel. We put the Intel video card in priority in the BIOS, but do not turn off the rest. For USB, several separate controllers are also desirable. I did exactly the same, put 2 additional ones. The sound is easier, you can remove it from HDMI.
Download and install XCP 1.6 first on 1 ssd disk and specify it as the main hard disk for virtualization to work. On the controller for the hypervisor, I leave this ssd and a 1TB hard drive (for shared files for operating systems). Next, you need to share a 1TB hard drive for other systems as root media. To do this, you need to deliver packages with samba to centos. To be able to install additional packages on the system, you need to enable the yum configuration.

nano /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo
nano /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Vault.repo

I myself installed MC, samba. Connect, mount a 1TB hard drive in fstab and share it in sabma. After that, you can safely proceed to the next manipulations. To adequately configure the VM in XCP, I use XenCenter, and for it to work properly, you need to make some manipulations to configure the hypervisor itself.

cd /opt/xensource/bin
  /etc/init.d/xapi stop
  cp -vp xapi xapi.original
  sed -i 's/1\.4\.90/6.0.99/g' xapi
  /etc/init.d/xapi start

And you also need to install the package responsible for the VM transfer. If suddenly you need it, for this you need to download the image from the Citrix XenServer website and install the packages.transfer-vm/xenserver-transfer-vm-6.1.0 package on the
system I take it to ssd for the hypervisor, but for windows a separate hard disk will be used, on a separate controller, so the created virtual hard disk image can be deleted and first forward our controller to the system or forward all hard drives to win as block devices.
Connections of hard drives without controller forwarding, but in the form of block devices.
Create a folder for links
Create an SR
well, we link our hard drives from the system
, and now we can go to xencenter, rescan the SR storage and connect hard drives from there to our system. More than 4 hard drives cannot be forwarded using this method. But you can remove the limit and increase it to 16.
To transfer devices to the VM, do lspci - in order to find out what our controllers are called.

xe vm-param-set other-config:pci=0/0000:01:00.0,0/0000:01:00.1 uuid=d103a91d-5c38-844f-14d5-64b3c495eb08

For example, for forwarding usb and video controller. But in my case, this approach is for Mint, and for win we also throw in a controller with hard drives. Optionally, you can throw and sound card. Now it remains to launch our new VMs and install operating systems and drivers on them. For shared files in windows, I share the rest of the hard drives. In order to "integrate" the systems into each other, I connect folders with balls from the hard drive from the hypervisor as folders with the environment on both win and mint (desktop, my documents, my music, etc.). The side effect is link files from mint on the windows desktop and shortcuts from win on the mint desktop. Well, for the convenience of working with systems, I recommend installing the Synergy mouse and keyboard forwarding program. The program can also move the keyboard after the mouse, general copy-paste and even drag and drop files. Very convenient in our case. It is also cross platform. I recommend connecting and forwarding control from the system that will be the main one. Well, for the future, you can try to combine all monitors for Nix. To do this, I want to put on win xserver and connect to xorg as an additional monitor.
I apologize in advance if someone wrote incomprehensibly and chaotically. On Thursday morning I want to help people, but I can't do it qualitatively =)
Wow, I almost forgot =) autostart of operating systems in the hypervisor.
Well, do not manually launch operating systems for us. According to articles on Habré, you can see that there is no particular drop in performance,

Answer 3

2. With hardware virtualization, the minimum
is 3. Yes, you can turn on 3D toys with a forwarded video card on ultra, I do it
myself. I have an AMD processor, video cards too. I use Xen, in Dom0 Ubuntu x64, in DomU Windows 8 x64 (sometimes for tests I run Windows XP without a separate video card, access via vnc).
As for the rest of the points, I can’t advise anything authoritative, since I’m not a great specialist in this area.

Answer 4

Qubes OS will help you.) True, it seems to be still in beta, but its principle is what you need, as I understand it

Answer 5

And for questions:
1,2,5: Intel / AMD - you won’t feel the difference, the main thing is that the hardware has hardware support for virtualization
From the wiki:

Hardware virtualization provides performance comparable to the performance of a non-virtualized machine, which makes virtualization practical and widespread. The most common virtualization technologies are Intel-VT and AMD-V.

3.6: only the host OS allows copy/paste of text, sort of, but it's more secure without it.

Answer 6

I'll take the opportunity and ask. How can you organize the work of the mouse + keyboard simultaneously in two or more virtual machines? (at least with the ability to switch). After all, having thrown a video card for games, I would like to throw a single mouse, and then somehow go back.
ps: I know about kvm switch.