VM

VM distribution

Main VM candidate:

• VirtualBox - most popular one, support for Windows and Linux (guest and host), GNU GPL v2.

Virtual Box Guest Additions have different license: PUEL.

Other VM candidates:

• VMware - commercial license
• KVM - only LInux machine may be host.
• Bochs - x86 emulator.
• ZeroVM - light solution based on Chromium Native Client (NaCl). ZeroVM website - http://www.zerovm.org/. Gitub repository is not developed since 2015, but maybe there are still some useful elements to be used in the future.

Sending resources

Possible solutions:

• Shared directories
• SFTP on VM

VM communication and starting computation

Scope for starting task may be written in an external file.

Possible solutions:

• SSH
• daemon on VM checking shared directory

Starting and stopping machine

Possible solutions:

• VBoxHeadless
• Vagrant
• Docker

VM configuration

Possible solutions:

• VBoxManage
• Docker
• Vagrant - problem with Vagrant - it doesn't have to support newest VM (for example for a pretty long time it doesn't support VirtualBox 15).

Problem with disk resizing - getting smaller disk size requires discarding old machine and creating new one. Getting bigger disk is possible but requires additional operations on machine - changing partition size.