It's redhat's virtualization offering: http://virt-manager.org/

KVM is supposed to be the de-facto virtualization technology on Linux and virt-manager is supposed to be the de-facto front end for KVM. It's actually one of the lightest virtualization apps around since all the hard work is done by the kernel and qemu - virt-manager is a pure python GUI which just calls qemu/kvm functionalities through libvirt.

It can also be used as front-end to virtualbox and xen, though I've never tried that myself.

Compared to virtualbox, it does well for server based appliances, but I would recommend virualbox for desktop based appliances, since it has hardware acceleration which makes the desktop feel much more snappier.

>I really like Crunchbang, but I can't use it because it lacks virt-viewer 0.5.6, or newer

Grab virt-viewer 1.0 source codes from there website and compile it on Crunchbang. http://virt-manager.org/download/

https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=virt-viewer

Yes. You pretty much administer the whole setup from the command line if you wish. I can get a bit complicated when creating VMs, but it can be done. See 'virsh':

• http://libvirt.org/virshcmdref.html

I've done as ohay_nicole suggested and ran virt-manager for several months, but the lack of backups was frustrating:

• http://virt-manager.org

Then I switched to Proxmox:

• http://proxmox.com

And, never looked back. Migrated my .qcow2 files over and was up and running within a day. It has a really nice web based interface and support for backups, plus decent documentation.

In my screenshot the program is Gnome Boxes, but virt-manager is very good too (it allows for more flexibility and configuration).

If you already have a PC running most of the time, I suggest a VM in a decent hypervisor (type 1 like KVM, not type 2 like Virtualbox which will affect performance - check out virt-manager)

Not off the top of my head, but I can give you the general steps you'll take and you can google from there:

• The hypervisor will run KVM with libvirtd. (note the d for the libvirt daemon.) Libvirtd will give you the connection needed for whatever frontend you need to manage your virtualization environment.
• Leaving the hypervisor headless, use a libvirt frontend like virt-manager, boxes, or something else to provision and manage your VMs. Connecting to libvirtd is easiest with SSH. (the qemu+ssh:// protocol)

And yes, your hypervisor is gonna be purely CLI managed, as is the *nix way.

Well, in that situation I suggest that you not bother with proxmox at all for these specific needs. Maybe try libvirt (it uses qemu/kvm amongst others) and for easy management use Virtual machine manager ( http://virt-manager.org/ )

Good luck

Release announcement:

I'm happy to announce the release of virt-manager 1.0.0!

Our version numbers were starting to get awkward, and this release was suitably featureful, so it felt like time to bump the major version. (And it's trendy these days, right?).

virt-manager is a desktop application for managing KVM, Xen, and LXC virtualization via libvirt.

The release can be downloaded from:

http://virt-manager.org/download.html

The direct download links are:

http://virt-manager.org/download/sources/virt-manager/virt-manager-1.0.0.tar.gz

This release includes:

• virt-manager: Snapshot support
• New tool virt-xml: Edit libvirt XML in one shot from the command line: http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2014-January/msg01226.html
• Improved defaults: qcow2, USB2, host CPU model, guest agent channel, ...
• Introspect command line options like --disk=? or --network=help
• The virt-image tool will be removed before the next release, speak up if you have a good reason not to remove it.
• virt-manager: Support arm vexpress VM creation
• virt-manager: Add guest memory usage graphs (Thorsten Behrens)
• virt-manager: UI for editing <filesystem> devices (Cédric Bosdonnat)
• Spice USB redirection support (Guannan Ren)
• <tpm> UI and command line support (Stefan Berger)
• <rng> UI and command line support (Giuseppe Scrivano)
• <panic> UI and command line support (Chen Hanxiao)
• <blkiotune> command line support (Chen Hanxiao)
• virt-manager: support for glusterfs storage pools (Giuseppe Scrivano)
• cli: New options --memory, --features, --clock, --metadata, --pm
• Greatly improve app responsiveness when connecting to remote hosts
• Lots of UI cleanup and improvements

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release through testing, bug reporting, submitting patches, and otherwise sending in feedback!

Thanks, Cole

Release announcement:

I'm happy to announce the release of virt-manager 1.0.0!

Our version numbers were starting to get awkward, and this release was suitably featureful, so it felt like time to bump the major version. (And it's trendy these days, right?).

virt-manager is a desktop application for managing KVM, Xen, and LXC virtualization via libvirt.

The release can be downloaded from:

http://virt-manager.org/download.html

The direct download links are:

http://virt-manager.org/download/sources/virt-manager/virt-manager-1.0.0.tar.gz

This release includes:

• virt-manager: Snapshot support
• New tool virt-xml: Edit libvirt XML in one shot from the command line: http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2014-January/msg01226.html
• Improved defaults: qcow2, USB2, host CPU model, guest agent channel, ...
• Introspect command line options like --disk=? or --network=help
• The virt-image tool will be removed before the next release, speak up if you have a good reason not to remove it.
• virt-manager: Support arm vexpress VM creation
• virt-manager: Add guest memory usage graphs (Thorsten Behrens)
• virt-manager: UI for editing <filesystem> devices (Cédric Bosdonnat)
• Spice USB redirection support (Guannan Ren)
• <tpm> UI and command line support (Stefan Berger)
• <rng> UI and command line support (Giuseppe Scrivano)
• <panic> UI and command line support (Chen Hanxiao)
• <blkiotune> command line support (Chen Hanxiao)
• virt-manager: support for glusterfs storage pools (Giuseppe Scrivano)
• cli: New options --memory, --features, --clock, --metadata, --pm
• Greatly improve app responsiveness when connecting to remote hosts
• Lots of UI cleanup and improvements

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release through testing, bug reporting, submitting patches, and otherwise sending in feedback!

Thanks, Cole

I've used it, but after using VMware there's just no way I'd stick with virtualbox.

I'm using KVM now, If you don't have to run windows as base OS, try that instead. (I use fedora with virt-manager) .

Only downside is the CPU needs to support either AMD-V or Intel VT, but anything close to being recent supports it. (do check if it's enabled in the BIOS, lots of vendors leave it off as default)

Did not concider Xen or Hyper-V as an option