Proxmox control Virtualbox

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naemr

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Sep 18, 2017
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This may or may not have been braught up before, i could not find it using forum searches that made sense to me.

I would love to see an option for Proxmox to control Virtualbox.

Now, before the current KVM fans explode this thread, stop, I do not wish to replace KVM, it is wonderful and has many uses.
But Vbox too, has many uses, and although some uses between the two overlap, each come out ahead in differing areas.
(comparisons between the strong points of both can be found via your favorite search engine, i do not wish this thread to become a VS war over the two, I use both extensively, and wish only to bring the two together!)

Think of it not as replacing anything, simply adding one more tool that is available to everyone.
Both already run side by side flawlessly (at least in-so-far as i have tested) and this really would be little more then adding a few buttons to the Proxmox webgui to issue commands to Virtualbox's cli management system.

Possibly as a separate, small package, said package would ether patch, or inform the webgui that virtualbox is present, and provide the webgui with the nessesary mappings to carry out Virtualbox related tasks.

This would allow a much more streamlined workflow for those of us whom still rely on Virtualbox for some VMs.

And of course sadly, my coding skills are not anywhere near enough to bring this idea to fruition myself, none the less I believe it would be a useful feature, and could even be extended a bit to allow Proxmox, from the webgui alone, to migrate VMs from, and possibly even to, Virtualbox with but a click or two, easing and simplifying the migration process for newcomers to Proxmox who no longer need Virtualbox, adding new tools for those of us who do, and opening Proxmox up to another section of the virtualization community.
 
Hi,

this feature will not come and I don't think virtualbox and kvm can run parallel on a node.
Because kvm.ko and vboxdrv use the same resources.
Except qemu use software emulation, what slow down the VMs massive.
 
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It is a shame the feature wont be added.

as far as running in parallel, I have a node running both proxmox VMs and a few Virtualbox VMs (as Vbox supports usb2 passthrough, and video hardware access passthrough far better than KVM/qemu, just to name a few reasons) and they do in fact work quite well with each other, just wish i did not have to use two seperate management interfaces for them.
 
Virtualbox can use KVM for its CPU virtualization, setting a VM to use KVM thus has vbox and proxmox both simply sending commands to the KVM module, instead of proxmox/KVM and virtualbox both trying to fight for virtualization extensions.

you can also turn off virtualization extensions in vbox, and see only a small performance drop, and vbox can still use some hardware passthrough techniques without it (keep in mind VBox became popular, because it catered originally only to the "consumer" market, end users with lower end, often highly outdated systems, wanting to play with virtualization for one reason or another, they never took away its ability to virtualise without hardware assistance, which is one more point it comes out ahead on KVM, KVM its ether virtualization extensions with passthrough, or full software virtualization, huge performance loss!) (although, qemu/KVM can virtualise hardware you don't even have, ie, you can have an ARM kvm, on an x86 host...)

in my case I simply set vbox to use KVM as its virtualization method for the VMs that need almost metal like access, the rest that i only need usb2 support on, I turned off Vextensions, no notable performance change. guests in the now non-vextends VMs range form Linux to windoze, windoze VMs ranging form windows 7 up to windows 10.

If KVM would ever stop arguing about which fix to apply to what problem, this would not even be an issue, but until that team figures out what they are doing, i still hold hope ether the proxmox team, or some skilled coder, will make my small dream happen. :)
(for the record, the issue of USB2 in KVM has been around since USB2 came to be, and the KVM team has about 17 fixes all of which work none of which cause any other issues (they have many many more fixes for the usb2 issue that do break things.) but not one of the 17 has ever been put into the main codebase, because they cant agree on which one to use! dig through there bugs and mailing lists to see there internal half-hearted debating.)
 
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Oh and, currently, I use remotebox to handle Virtualbox tasks on the node. so basicaly when i go off to VM land, i have to have a browser window open for proxmox, remotebox open for virtualbox, and an ssh console or 2 open when i want to move something between proxmox and virtualbox (in ether direction)


interesting side note, with the proxmox repos added to a system, installing virtualbox first, actually installs the PVE kernel, i assume because it is set to see it as superior
note that normally virtualbox does not update the kernel of the to-be-host system on install, only if the proxmox repo is available and apt has had update run to make the PVE kernel available for install.
 
I read the thread title and first entry and instantly jumped to the same conclusion as @wolfgang. @naemr is totally right, it can work together and is a nice touch for my notebook/laptop based PVE single hosts. They often lack the desktop support, which virtualbox offers.

Thank you @naemr for bringing this to my attention!
 
Sorry, I jumped the gun there ... have you tried to run a KVM machine from PVE at the same time as running one from VirtualBox? It does not work for me.
 
Yes, i run them both side by side, if it is not working, make sure you have selected KVM as your virtualization provider in virtualbox. KVM hard locks the VX extensions of the host CPU and thus does not play well with others, VBox can use KVM directly as the virtualization engine, simply adding in its own features on top of it.
 
naemr said:
Yes, i run them both side by side, if it is not working, make sure you have selected KVM as your virtualization provider in virtualbox. KVM hard locks the VX extensions of the host CPU and thus does not play well with others, VBox can use KVM directly as the virtualization engine, simply adding in its own features on top of it.
Click to expand...

Yes, I tried that and it does not work. KVM locks the VX as you described yet I still get an error that it does not work:
I use "paravirtualization interface: KVM" and still got: VT-X is being used by another hypervisor. If I try the other way around I got "failed to initialize KVM: Device or resource busy".
 
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