Desktop virtualization in Ubuntu 8.04: replacing VirtualBox with QEMU/KVM/Qemulator

I really liked VirtualBox and got a lot of use out of it when running my old Windows XP system under Ubuntu. However, the lack of support for 64-bit systems proved too problematic. In testing Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) I was only interested in testing the 64-bit versions as that was all I would be running. As some bugs are architecture dependent (iproute and monsterz come to mind) it's important to perform testing on the architecture you will actually use. Under Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) I had some issues with QEMU and KVM though I was able to use them enough to do testing (though often only through QEMU with specific parameters at a less than ideal speed). However in Ubuntu 8.04 I found both applications improved and decided to search for a nice front-end to replace the functionality I was used to with VirtualBox.

I tried virt-manager, qtemu, qemu-launcher, and qemulator for front-ends. I wanted something that would allow easy access to QEMU (including qemu-system-x86_64) and KVM. I also wanted something that would enable me to easily use my existing QEMU qcow2 images as well as my legacy VMDK and VDI images (though I have since converted most, if not all, images to qcow2). Of all the options I found Qemulator to be the best. It was easy to add KVM support and has a fairly nice layout to select QEMU options such as network, sound, and video configurations. It also fairly easily allows snapshot mode, which is nice. The only thing that I haven't figured out is if there is a way to not only run a virtual machine with VNC but also automatically launch a client to connect to it. I've read that using VNC may help with enabling copy-and-paste operations between the host and guest systems.

Ubuntu 8.04 comes with a much improved version of bochsbios (which caused problems in 7.10). KVM and QEMU are both newer and more functional versions than those present in 7.10. Since KVM is working so well I haven't yet tried KQEMU which I had some problems with in 7.10 but I hope that it works better as well.

I'm satisfied with my current solution which can run Linux and Windows quickly and without using large amounts of resources. This is the first time I've felt that a FLOSS desktop virtualization solution has met all of my needs. And that's definitely progress.