Qemu on Mac instead of VirtualBox

Question

Assuming I only want to use Linux as guest, are there any advantage in using Qemu instead of VB or other commercial solutions such as VM Fusion?

I want to easy to ro tun Linux on my Mac without too much CPU/memory usage.

Answer 1

I guess you mean QEMU's port Q (http://www.kju-app.org).

I used Q some time ago and though it's a nice solution it lacked an important feature: you couldn't save the virtual machine's state. I had to shut down the VM, I couldn't suspend it.

That may have changed, so I'd recommend that you test Q, VirtualBox, VMware Fusion (trial version here) and Parallels (trial version here). At least in my case, it's the little details that matter, so it's worth doing your own research and forming your own opinion.

You will have to sacrifice memory and CPU for running a VM, but I don't think there are many differences between the three virtualization products (unless you want hardware acceleration for X11, then you probably have to go for a commercial solution).

(I use a VMware Fusion for running Ubuntu 12.04 and I'm happy with the latest version (I tested Parallels and it's also a good piece of software. I chose VMware because of interoperability - it is the platform we use at work).)