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by blitzclone 865 days ago
The out-of-the-box performance of Windows in VirtualBox is very good and usually better than virt-manager (Qemu). You can tune Qemu to great performance as well, but it takes some fiddling. VirtualBox is in general very user friendly.

Guest integration (drag'n'drop, clipboard), USB passhthrough and audio support is also top-notch in VBox.

2 comments

> The out-of-the-box performance of Windows in VirtualBox is very good and usually better than virt-manager (Qemu). You can tune Qemu to great performance as well, but it takes some fiddling. VirtualBox is in general very user friendly.

I haven't found a significative difference but if you have found one and can tune qemu to same level,why don't you share the xml template of your machine to the world and to upstream's virt-manager project?

> Guest integration (drag'n'drop, clipboard), USB passhthrough and audio support is also top-notch in VBox.

These things works well with libvirt too provided you are using the spice-guest-tools.

Not sure about drag'n'drop. Also I've noticed that even when you're aware of the way USB passthrough in virt-manager GUI works that it seems to have some bugs.

I'm mostly interested in if I can use virtualbox accelerated video with kvm because virgl3d seems well behind in that area.

ah yes maybe drag'n'drop is not working I have no idea tbh but I don't remember it working reliably in virtualbox and shared folders always worked better in my limited experience.
Shared folders does indeed seem like a weak point for kvm/virt-manager. There's the virtioFS but this is a pretty recent addition that was also recently pretty buggy on Windows.

I'm not even sure what your alternatives were for this before now, I guess everyone was just using samba.

Until you want to pass a GPU to the VM
With this version of VBox, it's quite possble to pass a GPU to the VM. Have a look at https://www.cyberus-technology.de/products/hypervisor if you want to see a demo.