Bitten by VirtualBox yet again, moving to kvm

I like VirtualBox. Have for a long time. But it has some … well … interesting failure modes. Including some that have locked up my host machine. The problem for me is that I’ve got my Windows desktop environment for my normal desktop hosted there. And I need this every now and then. Today was the final straw. Working on a document about some of our updates in Word. I don’t like Word, but some of our partners use it, and its easier to use it than to fight the battle convincing them to use LibreOffice. For now. So there I am working away. I plug in my iPhone to charge it and … CRASH This isn’t the gentle crash one might expect in a well isolated VM environment. Oh no. It took down the linux desktop too. Restarted, relaunched the VM, and now Word wants to re-install itself. This is getting old. I can’t have this. We are using kvm elsewhere throughout the organization, so mebbe its time to move to that? I pulled out one of the two remaining Win7 licenses, and installed it on my desktop. Bridged the network. Its up. I’ll put windows on it, and probably will need to rebuy Adobe for it (wish I didn’t have to, wish I could move it). FWIW: I have a mac mini on my desktop as well, and it generally works well, though the VM performance is terrible. Almost unusable. So I’ll finish this up. Then when I need to move the VM, it will be so much easier to put it on our central machine, so I don’t need to run it on my desktop. And it will just work. Kvm rocks. VirtualBox … less so.