I’m an avid user of virtual machines, primarily for development work on the desktop, but also in the Enterprise. For desktop virtualisation I’ve tried them all – Microsoft’s Virtual PC, VMWare Server and I’m now hooked on VirtualBox, Sun’s open-source offering to the gods of virtualisation. The performance is excellent, it ‘feels’ like a stable product and is actively maintained with regular releases.
For me, Virtual PC never felt stable enough and when running several VM’s at once to test clustered BizTalk installations – I could never get the desired performance. I moved to VMWare’s free VMWare Server which felt a lot more stable and ran quickly, but thrashed I/O. After reading Tim Anderson’s glowing blog post on VirtualBox a good few months ago, I decided to take the plunge and have never looked back.
Restoring a VM from a saved state and saving itself is blisteringly quick – much quicker than either VMWare or Virtual PC; the VM’s themselves are rock solid, even after being started and stopped several times during a working week and don’t cause the same I/O problems previously experienced. The admin ‘console’ is based on the Trolltech Qt tool set and although slightly different to VirtualPC and VMWare products it is intuitive annd easy to use. More importantly, VirtualBox can read VMWare disk images (and with some work, VirtualPC images), so no need to re-create all of those environments!
VirtualBox was originally developed by Innotek GmbH, but was acquired by Sun earlier in the year to form the desktop element of the company’s xVM virtualisation strategy. There doesn’t appear to be a development roadmap available on the website, but they have an excellent release cycle with regular bug and stability fixes. All in all, an excellent product that gets the seal of approval from this blogger.
If you’re interested in trying out VirtualBox, head on over to the downloads page and grab a copy of their latest release. Let me know how you get on!
Additional VirtualBox Reading on this Blog
You may be interested in reading some of my other VirtualBox related posts:
Well, I’m a vbox fan, too, but until they successfully reproduce directx and opengl in a VM, it seems much too early to say beats vmware and virtualpc anyday……. What about those days you want to play a game with opengl or d3d?
Good point, but I don’t ‘do’ games – I spend far too much time sitting in front of a PC at work!
What an ignorant respons… Perhaps the author sits at work and tries to work but some of the developers do their work playing (testing) games :P
VirtualBox is incredible. I also have a take on why VirtualBox is great. If anyone is interested I have posted my thoughts at http://www.fiascode.com/general-technology/5-reasons-virtualbox-rocks-my-socks/
I’ve tried both.
vmware idle machine == negligible cpu usage.
vbox idle machine == 20% cpu usage.
vbox smooth on games but cpu suffers most.
Q8200
DDR2-4GB
sata-500GB
I agree with your points. I wrote some more advantages about Sun VirtualBox in my blog, http://virtualization.sysprobs.com/8-advantages-sun-virtualbox-vmware-workstation
But, not all accepted.
You can check the discussion in sun blog about my topic at http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=26668