Should I look at Qemu again?

I have been looking at Qemu a bit more than a year ago with the intent to replace VirtualBox hosting my VMs (Windows Server/10 VMs, Mac and of course a few Linux VMs here and there). Not so much because I was unhappy with Virtualbox but more for getting away from Oracle.
Now, with the recent issues I had with Virtualbox and Kernel 5.8 and coincidentally the below statement from @nate

running windows in qemu is night and day difference compared to vitualbox

in another thread, I thought I might give this another spin.

What proofed to be challenging a year ago was support for modern screen resolutions and clipboard. I got this to work with installing an additional management package. Unfortunately this wasn’t really stable, but what finally made me stop was that the only way to share a host folder was via Samba? This looked like overkill to me and not worth the effort.

So for those of you which know/run Qemu, would you recomend switching over with these requirements:
Client support

  • Windows 10
  • Windows Server
  • Mac Catalina? I have a pre Catalina Virtualbox VM which somehow won’t upgrade

Feature set

  • Clipboard support
  • Local drive mapping
  • Reasonable screen resolutions
  • Possibility to migrate VMs from Virtualbox to Qemu/KVM (I think that was possible already back then)
  • Possibility to convert VMs to something digestible for Hyper-V (Need to share with a Windows based collegue every now and then)
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I’m also very interested to try as well!

May i add to this one also auto-resize of windows like in VirtualBox, is it possible?

P.S. The only benefit of VirtualBox to me was compatibility for any host system, but since i don’t use anything except Linux anymore as host… Really not care :slight_smile:

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@keybreak gnome-boxes is a really good frontend to Qemu, even though I am a Plasma user, I use it.

Just make sure you have spice and spice-vdagent installed.

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If you are looking for something like vmware, check out Proxmox. These might be more than you are looking for though.

I am ok with the feature set of Virtualbox, but if Qemu would offer similar capabilities I’d like to move away from Oracle. Proxmox on the other hand seems to be overkill for my use case though. I need the VMs on my laptop and usually I don’t run more than 3 at a time which my machine can easily handle.

I myself have always preferred virtual-box because I find it easier to set up and use as I’m more familiar with it. I just switched to virt-manager until virtual-box is working correctly again.

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My problem with the others (other than Virtualbox, that is) is that I can’t get them to see my local network. If anybody knows how to accomplish that, I’d appreciate it.