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Best free (preferably open source) type 1 hypervisor

oeci

I'm planning to repurpose my old PC (AMD Athlon FX-8350, 32 GB of RAM, Geforce GTX 770) as a server. For the fileserver part my intention is to use FreeNAS. But since the machine would be fairly overpowered for that use case I thought of using a type 1 hypervisor which would leave me all options open for further use. I know the gold standard would be vSphere by VMWare but despite the fact that cheap licenses can be purchased on ebay and there is even a basic free version called vSphere Hypervisor I'd gladly go for something more open, preferably even open source and free. I know of KVM but the pure command line administration is not really my preferred user interface. Any other solutions? Maybe something you can recommend because you have used it yourself?

 

P.S. It's not that I cannot live with a command line interface, it's just that I prefer a decent GUI, it makes administration so much more comfortable.

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Why use vsphere for a single machine?

Just install ESXi and leave it at that if you're not administering multiple boxes.

Aside ESXi, KVM, and HyperV I don't really know of any that are open and free off hand.

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XCP-ng is pretty okay.

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Thanks for your suggestions, much appreciated.

 

Another question: I looked on VMWare's website and to me it seems as they call vSphere Hypervisor what you are referring to as ESXi. At least the download link for ESXi leads to the software called vSphere Hypervisor. So vSphere Hypervisor is ESXi? Or am I confusing something?

 

 

There is no replacement for RGB except more RGB ?

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2 hours ago, oeci said:

Thanks for your suggestions, much appreciated.

 

Another question: I looked on VMWare's website and to me it seems as they call vSphere Hypervisor what you are referring to as ESXi. At least the download link for ESXi leads to the software called vSphere Hypervisor. So vSphere Hypervisor is ESXi? Or am I confusing something?

VMware just likes to be confusing like that, the actual product name for the thing you would be using is called ESXi under the product range named as vSphere which is multiple different products with different licenses.

 

I always default to ESXi because it really is good in all areas and I've used it since VMware became a thing at all (different product but w/e).

 

KVM is fine but I'd look for a management web interface for it if you go with it. XCP-ng is supposed to be very good but I've never used it myself, was XenServer but it forked off to that and away from the Citrix umbrella that put a lot of people off it.

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I like two that I use for personal projects:

 

PROXMOX (uses QEMU) has a great WebUI very user intuitive, good documentation. Setup and installation can be a bit of a pain but the OS is otherwise worth it. I have a beginners setup guide I wrote on it:

 

Another is using Debian+QEMU with either virt-manager or Cockpit as a front-end.

 

Both can do GPU pass-though, USB pass-though, network bridging, paravirtualization (for things like 10Gbit interfaces), drive pass-though, CPU pinning, huge-pages, etc.

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Wow, so many helpful comments. Now it looks like I have some reading and research to do. Thank you all for your help ?

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I've been wondering the same thing too, wanting to find a free open-source type 1 hypervisor.  (Just to clarify, that is the one that runs on bare metal and doesn't require an underlying OS, right?)

 

I haven't been actively looking recently, but this thread reminded me about it.

 

Also there's a criteria that I'm looking for in such a hypervisor, and I'm having trouble finding one that meets it -- that is, one that is EXTREMELY light on system resource usage, thereby allowing pretty much the full power / capacity of the system to be used for the "hypervised"(?) OSs (even on old low-end hardware), while still supporting current / cutting-edge OS's, as well as being easily adaptable to ones that haven't been invented yet.

 

For example, I'd like a hypervisor that on its own would run on like a 286 or 386 with room to spare - taking maybe 1-2% of the CPU, maybe 16-40kB RAM, 0.5-1.5MB storage, etc.  Of course the OS's being run on top would likely need to meet their own requirements.  Also if the hypervisor required certain features only found on newer hardware, the above would be how light it would be.  (For example, on the CPU, it might only use about 10-25 KIPS (thousand instructions per second) or so - I think the 286-12 is about 1.28 MIPS or so per Wikipedia.  On the same page, the Ryzen 7 1800X is around 300 GIPS; it doesn't seem to have newer CPU benchmarks there like Threadripper, etc, but I'd guess the hypervisor would use something like <10-8% CPU or so .)

 

As for user interface for the hypervisor itself, I'm thinking something like the pseudo-graphical ASCII / ANSI interface that some programs in the 1980s had, or something similar to a stripped down version of Xerox Alto, Windows 3 or earlier, or early versions of Mac OS.

 

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12 hours ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

I've been wondering the same thing too, wanting to find a free open-source type 1 hypervisor.  (Just to clarify, that is the one that runs on bare metal and doesn't require an underlying OS, right?)

Yes Type 1 is one that runs bare metal, it abstracts hardware from Guest OS, where Type 2 abstracts Host OS from Guest OS. 

 

12 hours ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

Also there's a criteria that I'm looking for in such a hypervisor, and I'm having trouble finding one that meets it -- that is, one that is EXTREMELY light on system resource usage, thereby allowing pretty much the full power / capacity of the system to be used for the "hypervised"(?) OSs (even on old low-end hardware), while still supporting current / cutting-edge OS's, as well as being easily adaptable to ones that haven't been invented yet.

Most of the main hypervisors run lightweight out of the box. ESXi itself is very light weight, especially if you disable services like the vSphere Web Client

There is a minimal amount of CPU/Ram they need to use for virtual switching, firewall, performance metrics, resource management, etc...the overhead is extremely small though on a standalone host, its not like you're constantly running snapshots for backups or doing HA / DRS / etc in a multi-host environment. 

 

12 hours ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

For example, I'd like a hypervisor that on its own would run on like a 286 or 386 with room to spare - taking maybe 1-2% of the CPU, maybe 16-40kB RAM, 0.5-1.5MB storage, etc.  Of course the OS's being run on top would likely need to meet their own requirements.  Also if the hypervisor required certain features only found on newer hardware, the above would be how light it would be.  (For example, on the CPU, it might only use about 10-25 KIPS (thousand instructions per second) or so - I think the 286-12 is about 1.28 MIPS or so per Wikipedia.  On the same page, the Ryzen 7 1800X is around 300 GIPS; it doesn't seem to have newer CPU benchmarks there like Threadripper, etc, but I'd guess the hypervisor would use something like <10-8% CPU or so .)

 

As for user interface for the hypervisor itself, I'm thinking something like the pseudo-graphical ASCII / ANSI interface that some programs in the 1980s had, or something similar to a stripped down version of Xerox Alto, Windows 3 or earlier, or early versions of Mac OS.

 

Goodluck with finding that...

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On 12/29/2019 at 7:41 PM, Jarsky said:

Yes Type 1 is one that runs bare metal, it abstracts hardware from Guest OS, where Type 2 abstracts Host OS from Guest OS. 

Ahh, I'm pretty sure I'd want to do Type 1 then.  I want to be able to start, hibernate, shutdown, etc. my multiple OS's independent of each other, i can't really do that with VirtualBox.  Also I want the option of being able to start any of the OS's by itself instead of running it under the hypervisor, as long as it's compatible with my hardware.  I might virtualize / emulate some other OS's as well that aren't natively compatible.  That, and being able to hibernate a solo-started OS and resume it under the hypervisor, and vice versa.  And I would also like to be able to make snapshots, etc, assuming my system has enough resources.

 

 

Quote

 

Most of the main hypervisors run lightweight out of the box. ESXi itself is very light weight, especially if you disable services like the vSphere Web Client

There is a minimal amount of CPU/Ram they need to use for virtual switching, firewall, performance metrics, resource management, etc...the overhead is extremely small though on a standalone host, its not like you're constantly running snapshots for backups or doing HA / DRS / etc in a multi-host environment. 

 

Goodluck with finding that...

Hmm .... well I'm hoping to find a hypervisor that's light enough so that if I was to install it on a system like ones pictured below, the performance, resource usage, etc. difference between hypervised vs native would be no larger than the difference between OzTalksHW's and Nerd on a Budget's Ebay Blitz S1 FireStrike scores.  (Start at 18:06 if it doesn't automatically jump to that, I think mobile might need to do that.)  Basically, if the OS can run on the bare metal hardware even if it's right at the bare minimum (like some YT videos where people put WIn 10 on like a Pentium III or Win 7 on a Pentium 1 or II, IIRC), it can also run just as "well" when hypervised.  Of course if I'm running at the bare minimum like that, I wouldn't be able to use some of the other hypervisor features, but at least I could hopefully start the basic hypervisor service then start the OS.

 

System 1 (I was benching this one the last few days, after struggling with installing Windows 10 on an IDE HDD via USB - ended up using Win2USB after installing it on internal SATA drive (created a partition that was small enough to fit on the IDE HDD) then cloning it to the USB/PATA HDD; also took out 1 stick of RAM, disabled multicore and speedstep, etc on the CPU.  This runs Windows 10 Home 64-bit, but barely - it's not the most stable.  As I'm writing this, it has a BSOD with CRITICAL STRUCTURE CORRUPTION on screen. (I've also seen others frequently, like critical process died, page fault in non-paged area, and others I can' remember atm.):

IMG_20200105_071629.thumb.jpg.836fe9ce21466189cd0b8ad876757032.jpg

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System 2 (My brother may still have this sitting around, but idk if it would even turn on, or would doubt the PSU's safety after all these years.  I'd guess this *might* run Windows XP, but Windows 2000 or 98 would probably be better.):

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IMG_0907.thumb.jpg.17e4222cc85d576112d1ccb26c1314d2.jpg

 

System 3 (My parents' first system, the one I cut my computing teeth on at home.  I doubt this would run anything higher than Windows 3.0.):

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5aef24203eba7_2015-10-06Datel286PC1989-01-A-40mbhdd.thumb.jpg.6dc42b43f2814c954a4d5739f54d396c.jpg

 

5722c99e769aa_12029704_1084799311532847_2814324685966391467_o-286PCcollage.thumb.jpg.307ead75dce941e78c2731e788f6c981.jpg.180787c71abff54cb38ec915d8d48ad0.jpg
 

 

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1 hour ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

I want to be able to start, hibernate, shutdown, etc. my multiple OS's independent of each other, i can't really do that with VirtualBox. 

That, and being able to hibernate a solo-started OS and resume it under the hypervisor, and vice versa.  And I would also like to be able to make snapshots, etc, assuming my system has enough resources.

You can do all that with VMWare Workstation or Hyper-V. The primary advantage to Type 1 is the overhead, stability and security.

1 hour ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

Also I want the option of being able to start any of the OS's by itself instead of running it under the hypervisor, as long as it's compatible with my hardware.  

In that case you'd need to dual boot those, or swap disks. You cant run a virtualised OS outside of the hypervisor as its a virtual hard disk file. 

 

1 hour ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

Hmm .... well I'm hoping to find a hypervisor that's light enough so that if I was to install it on a system like ones pictured below, the performance, resource usage, etc. difference between hypervised vs native would be no larger than the difference between OzTalksHW's and Nerd on a Budget's Ebay Blitz S1 FireStrike scores.  (Start at 18:06 if it doesn't automatically jump to that, I think mobile might need to do that.)  Basically, if the OS can run on the bare metal hardware even if it's right at the bare minimum (like some YT videos where people put WIn 10 on like a Pentium III or Win 7 on a Pentium 1 or II, IIRC), it can also run just as "well" when hypervised.  Of course if I'm running at the bare minimum like that, I wouldn't be able to use some of the other hypervisor features, but at least I could hopefully start the basic hypervisor service then start the OS.

The problem with old systems like pre Pentium 4, is that they dont support VT-x or VT-d instructions. That is to say, they dont support virtualisation.

 

Additionally older systems can also be missing more advanced instruction sets and features for many modern OS' natively, so they'll either run quite poorly or just will not function at all.

 

You'll also find older virtualisation capable hardware like LGA775 etc...you'll probably have to use an older version of most hypervisors e.g for VMWare you might be limited to ESXi 5

 

1 hour ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

System 1 (I was benching this one the last few days, after struggling with installing Windows 10 on an IDE HDD via USB - ended up using Win2USB after installing it on internal SATA drive (created a partition that was small enough to fit on the IDE HDD) then cloning it to the USB/PATA HDD; also took out 1 stick of RAM, disabled multicore and speedstep, etc on the CPU.  This runs Windows 10 Home 64-bit, but barely - it's not the most stable. 

Any Windows OS from Vista onwards isnt really designed to be run on a single core which probably isn't helping. 

 

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just as Jarsky points out, there were SIGNIFICANT changes to how virtualisation worked once hardware assisted virualisation came in. nowadays the CPUs fully understand HOW to run multie virtual OSes and it's all handled on the CPUs themselves. and there is little to no overhead from virtualsed workloads. all modern hypervisors take advantage of this.

 

"back in the day"...

 

Before HW Assisted Virtualisation existed products like vmware GSX etc. used to use software trickery (Binary Translation) to get guests to run and this had a significant overhead. Almost all (if not all) modern hypervisors DO NOT SUPPORT this method anymore as it's super old. That's why you wont get things like virtualbox and vmware products to run on a Pentium 4 etc.

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