EDIT: I decided to go with Virtual Box since Hyper-V just doesn’t seem to work on my PC. Thank you everyone for the recommendations!
I’ve you’re running Linux on your system use KVM. If you’re running Windows, use Virtual box.
Doesn’t matter that much. Personally I’d just go with virtualbox because it’s open source.
I think both are usually fairly well supported, but VirtualBox being open-source it’s probably got slightly better drivers for desktop use although I’m sure VMware has it pretty well covered as well.
Ultimately it’s not going to affect the experience much. All Linux distros are going to perform comparably in a VM as long as the appropriate drivers are in use.
What you look for in a distro is more like the general experience of using it: does it have the packages you need, do you like the package manager and how the packages are structured, do you like how it sets up services. Especially for a more DIY distro like Arch, by the time you’ve set up your desktop environment and software you’ll probably have a good feel of how the distro works already. With Arch in particular you won’t be looking at any sort of out of the box experience (ie. does it install and support your hardware easily out of the box post-install) like you would if you were comparing Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Mint/SUSE/Manjaro.
I’ve had no issues using VirtualBox, and never bothered with VMware because it is proprietary. I would only consider VMware if you were in a commercial environment where it’s already in use.
You might be interested in these two wiki pages to compare how they work in practice:
If you can try andd use Hyper-V as it is windows native (if you have home edition then it’s not something you can use because M$).
If you want a simple hypervisor VirtualBox will do just fine and I’ve had a generally better experience with that over VMWare (that said both will do the trick).
Lastly I should mention that you can use Qemu on windows; but I’ve never tried that myself and it might require some tinkering to get to work but it is the fastest virtualization framework I know of.
Does Hyper-V have proper drivers in the kernel now?
no clue, I haven’t used windows in years by now.
I don’t think it matters, both should work well. The only place you might see a difference is 3D graphics acceleration. Not sure what the situation there is these days.
I’m not an expert, but I would say it doesn’t matter that much. I’m using VirtualBox because it’s easy to use, (partly) open source and it’s multi platform.
Hyper-v works and is built into windows. You might just need to install it as a feature.
KVM via virt-manager (GUI front-end for QEMU)
In my experience, there are no problems with either VirtualBox or VMware when it comes to Arch. Personally, I mainly use VirtualBox.
There’s also Hyper-V if you’ve got windows pro or better, I haven’t used VirtualBox in a while but it’s fine too.
Seems like HyperV is the obvious answer, but last I knew that was a Windows Pro and up feature. Virtual Box is a fine tool as an alternative.
Have you considered using hyper-v? That’s my go to if I have to run a VM on Windows.
It really doesnt matter much. They will both give you a good idea of what arch is like
They’re very similar, though last time I used VMware, it had problems with the latest Linux kernels on Linux hosts, I don’t know if it’s the same on Linux guests if you have Windows on you PC, but you probably wouldn’t want to reinstall everything if that’s the case.
VirtualBox is fine with Linux in any case.
In case of Windows guests on Windows hosts, I find VMware has slightly better performance.
