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Review of Sun's Free Open Source Virtual Machine

Posted by timothy on from the expanding-options dept.

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.

9 of 354 comments (clear)

  1. Binaries not Free by Bryansix · · Score: 5, Informative

    Â 2 Grant of license. (1) Sun grants you a personal right to install and execute the Product on a Host Computer for Personal Use or Educational Use or for Evaluation. âoePersonal Useâ requires that you use the product on the same Host Computer where you installed it yourself and that no more than one client connect to that Host Computer at a time for the purpose of displaying Guest Computers remotely. âoeEducational useâ is any use in an academic institution (schools, colleges and universities, by teachers and students). âoeEvaluationâ means testing the product for a reasonable period (that is, normally for a few weeks); after expiry of that term, you are no longer permitted to evaluate the Product.

    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.

    1. Re:Binaries not Free by TheBig1 · · Score: 5, Informative

      This is not quite correct - in the FAQ they state that you can use it on work machines and still have it count as personal use (even if it is used for buisiness purposes). However, if you make an install image and roll out to 1000 users, that would count as an enterprise install. See Virtual Box FAQ, point 6.

      Overall, I think this is quite a fair license and restriction.

      Cheers

  2. Works for me by trampel · · Score: 5, Informative
    I've been using the non-GPL version since before Sun acquired them to run XP-only work software under Linux on an 1.5GHz Athlon, with decent performance.

    The weird thing is that the boot time for XP in the virtual machine is shorter than on the real one.

  3. A Good VM by lgbr · · Score: 5, Informative

    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:

    • Intel E1000 Support.
    • Seamless window integration for popular OSes
    • Shared folders
    • VT-x/AMD-V and PAE/NX Support
    • Headless support

    Best of all, it's FOSS.

  4. Re:Sun by Drinking+Bleach · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. benchmark information by markybob · · Score: 5, Informative

    for benchmark information about virtualbox vs kvm vs vmware workstation, you might be interested in http://dipconsultants.com/press/24508-1/

  6. Re:it was released before sun bought it by Mental+Maelstrom · · Score: 5, Informative

    True. VirtualBox was GPL2'd in January 2007, Sun acquired InnoTek in February 2008 (source). So it was actually InnoTek, not Sun, who released VirtualBox into the wild in the first place. :-)

  7. Re:Mentions comparible speeds to VMware... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  8. Re:Mentions comparible speeds to VMware... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm sure there was a "no" post somewhere that was informative :D

    No