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Review of Sun's Free Open Source Virtual Machine
goombah99 writes "After snapping up virtualization company InnoTek at the beginning of the year, Sun has recently released VirtualBox as a fully functional and highly polished free GPL open source x86 Virtual Machine. It can host 32- or 64-bit Linux, Windows XP Vista and 98, OpenSolaris and DOS. It runs on Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix platforms. The download is just 27MB. A review of it on MacWorld, showing HD movies playing inside windows XP on a mac, demonstrates performance visually indistinguishable from VMware. Like its competition, it can run other OSes in rootless, rooted, or seamless modes display modes (where all the applications have their windows mixed at the same time). Each VM instance can only run single core (though I/O is multi-core), and it does not yet support advanced windows graphics libraries however, so some gamers may be disappointed. Slashdot discussed the InnoTek acquisition earlier.
but yeah, in the last few months, it's seen some polishing (particularly the Macintosh features).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The best virtualization I've found for windows hosts. Works great - I run Vista Ultimate host & Ubuntu guest in seamless mode on my laptop and everything is still fast as hell!
I'm happy.
The binaries are not Free for corporate use. The source is free (GPL) but good fucking luck compiling it on a windows machine. Maybe you could compile it on a linux machine but on windows it assumes a development environment complete with every freakin' thing under the Sun (no pun intended). I gave up after two days of trying to get it to work.
The weird thing is that the boot time for XP in the virtual machine is shorter than on the real one.
I find this to be an excellent VM that continues to make a lot of progress. After using VMWare server, Bochs, and QEmu, this one really takes the cake on both performance and usability. Virtual machines are easy to set up using a nice graphical interface, and all of the bells and whistles require no extensive configuration (sound, mouse integration). Running a Gentoo hardened Linux on amd64? No problem. Some of the features that really put VirtualBox above the rest for me:
Best of all, it's FOSS.
Sun was a proprietary vendor for quite a long time. Practically the whole reason that they take so long between announcing something is going to be open source (eg, Solaris and Java) and actually getting it into the public, is auditing the entire source tree to make sure they don't release some component licensed from some other company when they're not supposed to do that.
for benchmark information about virtualbox vs kvm vs vmware workstation, you might be interested in http://dipconsultants.com/press/24508-1/
"One of the main things I like about VMWare is the "Snapshot" capability which lets you create multiple "restore" points (in an easy to use visual "tree" manager) that you can instantly return to. In fact you can have a VM automatically revert to a snapshot. Does VirtualBox have any sort of advanced snapshot management?"
Yep.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
VirtualBox's greatest failing is that in using QEMU's I/O and networking code, they've made it a royal pain to set up bridged-mode networking on Linux hosts. You get to write two scripts, to add and remove a TAP device from a host-side bridge, and get to set up said bridge on the host yourself. Not only this, since the 2.6.18 kernel you need to run VirtualBox VMs as root (or set up sudo with /etc/sudoers not to prompt for a password and use it within your scripts), because only the superuser can manipulate the TAP/TUN devices; chmodding them writable by a particular privileged group is insufficient.
Compare to VMware, which handles all the bridging etc. by itself—much more convenient to use.
Then there are VirtualBox's "Guru meditations", obscure ERROR_MESSAGES_THAT_LOOK_LIKE_THIS and provide minimal information, often requiring perusal of the source code to figure out what's wrong. This is entirely unsuitable for end users as well as people whose time is valuable.
Finally, I tend to run a 64-bit kernel with 32-bit userspace. VirtualBox does not support this combination—it's either 32-bit kernel with 32-bit userspace or 64-bit kernel with 64-bit userspace. (VMware on the other hand does support 64-bit kernel with 32-bit userspace; its failing is that [as far as I know] there is no non-beta 64-bit userspace for VMware yet, though this will change with the release of VMware Server 2.0 and VMware Workstation 6.5.) This is only really a problem on Debian and Debian-derived distributions like Ubuntu, whose package manager (dpkg) is too incompetent to handle multiarch properly, despite work ongoing for about four years now, so the user has to set up a 64-bit chroot environment. (Fedora, RHEL and CentOS get this right; rpm can handle multiarch properly, so it's only a matter of installing the appropriate libraries there.)
VMware also supports 64-bit guests on certain processors. VirtualBox doesn't support 64-bit guests at all.
So in my view, between the two, VMware still wins, open source or no open source.
VMWare and Parallels seem to be better choices if you can afford them
vmware server edition is free, barring a registration via email. At least it was 3 months ago...
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
I couldn't get the networking to work in NAT mode, and bridging mode on a laptop ain't always the best idea.
There was a nice bug in 1.6.0 that severely hindered networking, it has been fixed in 1.6.2 though. I only had problems with bridges and tun devices, I didn't try NAT, the bug reports had windows hosts and Linux guests, my situation had Windows and Linux guests on a Linux host. To summarize the bug: networking works perfectly until you reboot the VM, then there is no working network.
Getting the networking system to work is a bit of a pain, but I've only had minor difficulties when using the host interface. NAT will work, but you won't be able to ping or access any resources in your own network (which is a bad thing if you have a fileserver at home and wish to access it on a VM). There are, however, a few tutorials that can help you get started with bridging your network for Windows hosts or a variety of Linux hosts.
FreeBSD is the only guest OS I've had difficulties with (even MSDOS will work, but it requires some additions to prevent it from eating up your cycles like crazy--FreeDOS plays nicely, though). I could only ever get the NAT-based networking to work and even then it would freeze whenever IO operations peaked.
Take a look at some of those articles, and you might be able to get networking up and running in VirtualBox! I have to say, for something of a FOSS offering, it's really nice.
He who has no
Parallels sold me their desktop software when I bought an Intel Mac. After repeated crashes (OS X kernel panics, not just application panics), they finally admitted that it was their fault and they hadn't read the documentation about how inter-processor interrupts were meant to work, so their kernel module crashed regularly on any Core 2 Duo machine. Their suggested fix? Buy the new version. Those pirates deserve to go out of business.
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With reservations.
You can't have snapshots of RAW disk images. it's also widely acknowledged (see the VB forums) that snapshot management is a weak point.
If you need snapshots, wait a few months/years until it works solidly
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The documentation states otherwise and you will notice the release date for VMware workstation 5.5.2 -- with 64bit Host support -- was May 2006. I have used a 64bit Host OS for VMware workstation for nearly that long.
If you are stating the free ESX Server does not support 64bit Host OS, the GSX documentation from December 2005 specifically states Windows Server 2003 x64 can be used as the host OS.
Have you tried looking at VMware lately?
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
It's not a hypervisor. It's basically just an application that you run under your real OS.
The main OS treats it as an ordinary application. The primary OS firewall will effect hosted machines, for example, and as far as audio, as long as your primary OS can deal with multiple applications playing sound, then it's a non issue. Otherwise, it happens as any other conflict would. Generally, first to open the device wins.
Yes, you can move the VM images around. Part of the whole point of the VM is that it is running on the virtual hardware, and doesn't have the ability to know what the physical hardware is.
hookups to scanners and printers. Except for OpenSolaris and W98SE (explicitly not supported), I've had working scanner and printer support on every OS (Kubuntu/Ubuntu V7 and V8, OpenSuse11, XP) I've tried Sun Virtualbox v1.6.2 with. I've been using it to review operating systems for publication. If I'd had a scanner and printer that worked with OpenSolaris, I think it would have worked just fine there, too.
Linux webcam support is problematic whether you're trying to get it on a real or a virtual machine. Has your webcam worked on any Linux physical box you've tried it on?
I'm planning to replace VMware Server with VirtualBox completely on this box. (Debian Lenny host)
Tech Public Policy stuff
I'm sure there was a "no" post somewhere that was informative :D
No
I find that VMWare is quite fast if you install the VMTools in the guest OS and the integration (cross VM copy/past / drag and drop, seamless mouse pointer, etc) is quite nice.
VB has something similar, called "Guest Additions", IIRC. I don't know if it makes the VM any faster, but I do know that it has clipboard sharing (with options on which ways it goes) and seamless mousing.
This is not a signature.
* Maybe Ubuntu users are used to that kind of thing.