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carcajou
Apprentice
Joined: 10 Jun 2008
Posts: 248
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 Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2023 9:08 am Post subject: Experience with different VM hypervisors for Windows guest? |
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Hi guys.
I have a need for a long-term Windows virtual machine for company related stuff and I would like to hear about experiences regarding different hypervisors? For few years I use Qemu/KVM+libvirt (with custom bash script or rarely virt-manager), but I run only Linux guests (and it's flawless).
Now I need to install Windows 10 or 11, so I can use Excel/MS Office package in combination with proprietary .NET based company accounting software. Wine is not an option for me, because it has to be supported and stable setup. Also, because of formatted copy/paste functionality which Windows provides (and I heavily use at my work PC).
Key points for me are: full resolution (because I will use VM full screen mostly) with basic/elementary graphics performance, file sharing (between Gentoo host and guest) and/or maybe USB forwarding.
I would appreciate a feedback (and maybe a tip or two) from someone who uses Windows VM regularly. I guess other options are Virtualbox and VMware Player?
Usually, I would test it myself with different hypervisors, but this weekend I have to set it up and start using it from Monday. In the meantime, I am quite time limited. Dual boot is out of consideration btw. |
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gtwrek
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 10 Mar 2017
Posts: 110
Location: San Jose, CA
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| Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2023 1:17 pm Post subject: |
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I only consider myself an intermediate Qemu/KVM user - I've got some virtual gentoo machines that I use, as well as a single Window 7 machine.
Qemu/KVM (with custom bash scripts) work fine for me.
My Windows7 needs are modest - I'm not playing games with it or anything, but I prefer full resolution - which seems to work fine. Looking at my scripts it seems I had some trouble getting audio to work in the VM, but I think I eventually resolved that.
My need to boot that Windows VM have dwindled - I see I've not started it up since Apr 2022. So, keep that in mind when considering my feedback here.
I had used Virtualbox in the past, and that worked as well. I can't recall the reasons why I switched to Qemu, but something led me down this path. (May have just been just for my learning sake, and I left things in that last working state) |
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mrbassie
l33t
Joined: 31 May 2013
Posts: 821
Location: Go past the sign for cope, right at the sign for seethe. If you see the target you've missed it.
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| Posted: Thu Jun 08, 2023 3:53 pm Post subject: |
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| kukibl wrote: | | For few years I use Qemu/KVM+libvirt (with custom bash script or rarely virt-manager), but I run only Linux guests (and it's flawless). |
Windows 10 runs great on kvm/qemu.
Guest drivers for full resolution etc
virtiofs and winfsp for shared host/guest directories.
| Code: | <filesystem type="mount" accessmode="passthrough">
<driver type="virtiofs"/>
<binary path="/usr/libexec/virtiofsd"/>
<source dir="path/to/share"/>
<target dir="G:"/>
<alias name="fs0"/>
<address type="pci" domain="0x0000" bus="0x08" slot="0x00" function="0x0"/>
</filesystem> |
^that's what virtmanager does. |
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C5ace
Guru
Joined: 23 Dec 2013
Posts: 484
Location: Brisbane, Australia
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| Posted: Fri Jun 09, 2023 9:05 am Post subject: |
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VirtualBox.
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Observation after 30 years working with computers:
All software has known and unknown bugs and vulnerabilities. Especially software written in complex, unstable and object oriented languages such as perl, python, C++, C#, Rust and the likes. |
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carcajou
Apprentice
Joined: 10 Jun 2008
Posts: 248
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| Posted: Mon Jun 26, 2023 8:29 am Post subject: |
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First of all, thank you all for the provided feedback.
I went with virt-manager, to keep things straight-forward and to use the same stack as for other VMs. I got the full resolution and host<->guest file sharing (thank you @mrbassie), but I am far from satisfied with performance (compared for example with Linux guests). Graphics are slow and laggy, sound has some kind of delay... It is usable, but the work flow is "demanding".
I am looking for the ways to try to tweak the setup and get some additional performance. Some info:
1) I used raw image format instead of qcow2,
2) the cache mode for disk is set to "writeback" (I followed these instructions: https://raphtlw.medium.com/how-to-set-up-a-kvm-qemu-windows-10-vm-ca1789411760),
3) VM has 6GB of RAM available and 4 dedicated threads/cores.
In case someone has additional tips, I would be thankful. The option of last resort would be to convert the raw image to .vdi and try with VirtualBox.
Last edited by carcajou on Mon Jun 26, 2023 10:04 am; edited 1 time in total |
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mrbassie
l33t
Joined: 31 May 2013
Posts: 821
Location: Go past the sign for cope, right at the sign for seethe. If you see the target you've missed it.
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| Posted: Mon Jun 26, 2023 9:44 am Post subject: |
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| I use qxl for video and spice rather than vnc. Video is fine for me. I've also tweaked the guest a bit however. Turning off file indexing gets a nice performance win. also disable all the desktop effects, turn off unnecessary services, change the power scheme. Also, there's a program I use called geek uninstaller which lets you remove all the "metro apps" bloat. |
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ali3nx
l33t
Joined: 21 Sep 2003
Posts: 731
Location: Winnipeg, Canada
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| Posted: Mon Jun 26, 2023 4:32 pm Post subject: |
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I have win 11 pro with tpm 2.0 emulation enabled provided by app-crypt/swtpm running qemu mostly using a virt-manager configured vm template. It's been very reliable.
The tpm emulation config imo has more often just worked by editing the vm xml config either with virt-manager or virsh edit <vm> by attempting to add the tpm device code below
| Code: | <tpm model='tpm-tis'>
<backend type='emulator' version='2.0'/>
</tpm> |
There's some merit to not using libvirt and virt-manager but forgoing using advantageous and beneficial utilities hasnt been as beneficial or usable in my experience. Since I've become more familiar with qemu I've not relied on vmware or virtualbox at all for personal use and some professional enterprise systems I've maintained.
Most of the qemu vm's I use are used remotely so features such as gpu passthrough aren't frequently required or are used for other devices but every qemu windows vm has virtio drivers installed.
virt-manager is available for cgywin. unfortunately the cgywin package currently has no maintainer and it's slightly outdated but last I used it still connected to libvirt remotely over ssh. If you had to use windows for an administrative workstation there's still available options for connecting to libvirt to manage a qemu/kvm hypervisor. ssh key auth is still required to remotely view the local gui session in virt-manager used from cgywin but that's required with a proper linux install environment as well.
I had wished someone would update the cgywin packages however 
One other configuration item that for simple vm server hosts makes using qemu so much simpler is creating a new network bridge interface instead of entirely relying on the provided virbr0 libvirt provided bridge. the virbr0 bridge is still useful however not being required to use virsh networking configuration certainly eliminates a lot of the anxiety many people experience when considering using libvirt.
If your considering using a gentoo host for a qemu/libvirt/virt-manager configuration you'll certainly benefit from additional use flags the default use flag configuration doesn't provide.
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