For the past few months we have been working hard to provide a fast, reliable and secure KVM backend for VirtualBox. VirtualBox is a multi-platform Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) with a great feature set, support for a wide variety of guest operating systems, and a consistent user interface across different host operating systems.
Cyberus Technology’s KVM backend allows VirtualBox to run virtual machines utilizing the Linux KVM hypervisor instead of the custom kernel module used by standard VirtualBox. Using KVM comes with a number of benefits.
Florian Pester, Markus Partheymüller
Excellent news. Dealing with the VirtualBox and VMware kernel modules can be a hassle if you’re using newer or custom kernels, and having the VirtualBox UI for kvm instead of things virt-manager is not something I’m unhappy about.
This is really nice. KVM / QEMU are far better technically but honestly I think VirtualBox has the better UI. I sometimes run into pre-built VirtualBox images as well which it will be nice to run natively on KVM. I think Microsoft offer pre-built Windows VMs for testing for exmaple.
Perhaps the nicest thing though is that VirtualBox is cross platform. I sometimes teach and, while I use Linux, students are typically on Windows or Mac. This will allow walk-throughs, demos, and documentation that they can follow along with on their machines.
Finally, not having to constantly re-install the VirtualBox module every time I install a new kernel is going to be awesome. It happens pretty often as I am on a rolling distro.
I too think this is a good development, but I fear VBox has lost a lot of ground in recent years especially since the introduction of WSL, and yes I realise WSL is not the same as a VM. However, personally I still have a large VM requirement for supporting legacy OS with legacy apps.
Hopefully we find a bit of fresh development now that there is KVM support to generate some new use cases.