Virtualization

I installed/used virtualization on IBM mainframes many many years ago, before Linux existed. So I understand the concept of virtualization. In the past, I used virtualbox for virtualization on Linux. It’s fairly straight forward. I’ve installed many Linux distros in a VM. I’m digging into this again because I would like to use this in Manjaro. But I want to do this the best way. I’ve successfully used the built-in Linux Kernel virtualization (KVM), which seems to be the most often recommended way to do virtualization these days. Since it’s built-in it makes sense that it would be the best and most efficient way to do this. Although I admit I find the procedure somewhat hard to understand…and I don’t like that. I got it working by following someones guide. I should just be happy that it’s working…but I’m not. It would be nice to actually understand the process. If I want to install Gimp on either Manjaro or Ubuntu I basically…install gimp! In order to use the virtualization built-in the Linux Kernel, you must install many packages, and many differ between Ubuntu & Manjaro. For example…any mixture of the following, depending on which distro and guide you follow, KVM, libvirt, libvirtd, virtinst, virt-manager, qemu, qemu-kvm, qemu-utils, vde2, ebtables, dnsmasq, bridge-utils, openbsd-netcat and the list goes on.

I read an article “How to install Virtual Machine Manager (KVM) in Manjaro and Arch Linux” and it’s followed by a list of everything to install but KVM. I know that KVM means Kernel-based Virtual Machine, so I assume it’s built into most Linux kernals…these days! So should the article instead be titled “How to install Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) in Manjaro and Arch Linux” or “How to enable KVM in Manjaro and Arch Linux”? Is everyone else secretly as confused as me and they just pass down what someone else has told them? In one Ubuntu guide I read, qemu-kvm was installed but this is not mentioned in the Manjaro guides I’ve seen. I’m beginning to think that these guides are so different because they followed someone else’s guide and not everything worked so they went to a forum and just started adding things suggested on the forum till it worked on their system. Somebody on another system did the same but their system was a little different so their guide was different. But they publish an install guide it like they know what they’re talking about. That’s why the comment section has so many people saying it didn’t work for them. The end result is we perhaps could be installing many things not needed on our system. I might expect that on an older system perhaps something required for virtualization, perhaps was previously installed while installing some other package, so although required it wasn’t needed on their system…because it was previously installed. Just a guess. I feel these guides would be best if used on a fresh distro install. I’m sure someone exists out there that really understands the process.

I probably should just get it working and pretend it makes total sense. Maybe I should erase this entire post and just say Today I Got Virtualization working in Manjaro using KVM…like it’s no big deal. Later down the road, I’ll show up at some Linux users group and when some young punk starts asking about virtualization I’ll just say I’d recommend using the built-in kernel virtualization modules! You know…KVM. And when he asks how to do it I’ll reply “It’s easy…just RTFM”.