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VirtualBox 2.1 Supports 64-Bit VM In 32-Bit Host
Stephen Birch writes "Following closely behind the mid-November 2.06 release of VirtualBox, Sun Microsystems has released version 2.1. This has a number of new features, but one of the most interesting is the ability to run a 64-bit VM inside a 32-bit host. Another useful feature is integrated host-based networking; no more fiddling around with network bridges. Sun is really giving VMWare a run for their money."
It's not really emulation. It actually works only on 64-bit hardware.
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
here's a howto install Virtualbox 2.1 in Ubuntu Linux:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1015045
sorry, the hardware has to be 64 bits. The most likely situation where you'd use this is 64-bit Linux or Solaris under 32-bit Windows. Most recent machines have 64-bit hardware, but a lot of people are wary of running 64-bit Windows. So I think this will be a useful configuration, if the performance penalty isn't too high.
I have an Athlon64 but run a 32 bit OS. I tried running a 64 bit virtual machine using VMWare Server 1.0.x a year or so ago and it worked. The performance was not noticeably poor.
So... assuming I haven't missed anything too obvious, my response would be "No, vmware is not getting a run for their money." Not today anyways.
A quick check of the user manual states hosting a 64-bit OS requires 64-bit hardware. So I think you are out of luck.
This update is really just adding support for running 64-bit on systems where the host OS is not taking advantage of 64-bit hardware they already have.
was the reason why I tossed out Virtual Box.
It was prone to problems, and became so annoying I ended up buying a license of VMWare.
There is also one area which is very unstable - OpenBSD support. It crashes the latest versions of OpenBSD, reports out-of-disk errors etc. OpenBSD is definitely more picky on the hardware it runs due to its strong security features, which Virtual Box doesn't appear to implement properly to make it look "real enough"
Sun has recognised problems with OpenBSD but has said its so far down the important-list it won't bother for some time.
I've been trying out VirtualBox for a while. VMWare had recently updated to v2.0 and had some annoying problems with the new tomcat based web front-end. It was unusable and drove a lot of people to other options. This was why I'd looked at VirtualBox.
It is easy to install and runs most OSes as a host. I tested the last two versions on CentOS 5.2 on 64bit and 32bit. The 32bit version running on my Inspiron E1505 laptop had issues with CPU utilization. No matter what was running (or not running) in the guest, it would completely spike the machine to 99% utilization. Fiddling with the CPU virtualization settings and other BIOS features had no effect.
Anyhoo, VMWare released an update that fixes the Tomcat issues. Xen is running great. Right now I don't have a lot of reason to switch, but VirtualBox does look very promising.
It means that the virtual network adapter can get IP connected without resorting to NAT. This was usually done by bridging a physical interface to a tun device and setting that tun device as VirtualBox's network device. Setting up this bridge requires using a script outside of VirtualBox to get everything set up. Now VirtualBox can do it from the GUI with no scripting required. In short, one can dedicate a physical NIC to VirtualBox by bridging it or allow VBox direct access to the host NIC.
The easy way to do networking with virtuals is to use NAT to pass TCP traffic to the virtual from the host's IP connection. That suffices for web surfing and other apps that don't severely exercise networking but it doesn't work well for things like VPN clients.
If you wanted your VM to have an IP and appear as if it is a real machine on the network many people used to have to follow the 100 odd lines of documentation here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VirtualBox#Networking
Now they can just start it and it works out of the box.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
You'd still need a copy of Windows. It would go a long way to replacing the dual boot, but Wine will still have its place. That said, I'm sure this is better than software rendering, but I have my doubts to the usability of 3D graphics in VirtualBox.
VirtualBox is free. VMWare Workstation costs money (the free Server products don't support 3D graphics).
The VirtualBox GUI is written with Qt, not GTK.
I'm using VirtualBox to run 32 bit Windows XP on a 64-bit Linux machine. VirtualBox 2.0 runs really well for me. I'm glad I can use an open-source package for this.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
Thus far, my virtual boxes have all been on a private network. I'm not even sure if they see each other, though I've not really tested that. I'm not even really sure how to open up the guests to the public network, though I'm 100% positive that it can be done. It's just that the defaults are all pretty secure.
That all means that your host is acting as a NAT router (by default anyway) and thus all the firewall that the host has will protect the guest(s).
Yes, if your guest gets infected, it's inside the firewall. Though, like I said, I'm not sure it can see the other guests, just the host. However, it's fairly easy to solve: turn off the VM, and roll it back to a clean state. I mean, if you're paranoid enough to be worried about such issues, you'll have old states which are known-good to roll back to. However, I've turned off pretty much all of WindowsXP's protections because it's hiding inside my Linux box, behind a cable-router (another NAT). The ability for something to get in and infect it is pretty much nil. Especially as I don't use IE or Outlook inside there (I use kmail for email, and firefox and konqueror on Linux for browsing, so no need) either.
The difference is VMWare emulates DirectX, using Wine.
What are you talking about? VMWare does no such thing, there is no connection between vmware and wine whatsoever.
I was in the same position as you, only recently found about VirtualBox, and have converted all my VMware images using the instructions here (which are distro-agnostic): http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/VirtualBox#Converting_from_VMware_images .
:)
Good luck!
have they resolved the pain in the ass issue with using USB on Linux Hosts?
The only way to get the machine into a usable state again is to manually edit the virtual machine definition, which is a lot more complex than one would immediately think. Just look at the VirtualBox bug tracker for some horror stories.
This confused the hell out of me the first time it happened on a virtual CD mount. But it only took a few minutes to realize that all that needed to be done was to disable the CD from the GUI. It should be just as easy to disable a hard drive.
While it is bad form to refuse to boot over something so trivial I don't see this as a show stopper.
Disclaimer: I'm not using VirtualBox in a production environment.
CPUs and GPUs are designed to handle *very* different kinds of instructions. GPUs are meant to work with matrices that are streamed into them. CPUs are designed to take a single stream of instructions and run it efficiently. While CPU-type instructions can theoretically be run on a GPU, you aren't going to get the kind of performance that you're dreaming of. Sorry, it just doesn't work that way.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I had the same experience and resolved it with disabling the disk in the GUI too. As you mention, it would be nice if VirtualBox would at least try to boot the VM even if a disk or two went on vacation (especially if it's a CD/DVD).
I've found VirtualBox to be much more pleasant than VMWare Player. Mainly due to:
- not so hard to get it working on 0-day kernels
- really annoying VMWare keyboard bug
That keyboard bug might be fixed now but the way VMWare (didn't) handle it is enough to move me on to more pleasant pastures.
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Virtualization
Check this out, it is not a emulator.
What are you talking about? VMWare does no such thing, there is no connection between vmware and wine whatsoever.
He's probably thinking of Parallels:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallels_Desktop_for_Mac#Wine_controversy
http://wiki.winehq.org/Parallels
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End The FED. -
So has anyone tried it yet? I was going to this weekend, but I got caught up in all sorts of pre-holiday preparations. I'll have plenty of time over the New Year to check it out though.
There's a whole pile of games that Wine won't play because of one measly little mouse bug. It will be great to finally have Aliens vs Predator working.
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Why most people are wary running 64 bit is beyond me. Only issue I have is lack of 16 bit support for really old DOS stuff which doesn't bother me. NVidia has drivers for 64 bit Vista/XP, most motherboards support it and most decent hardware has had drivers.
While this falls under cool category, if your running any serious virtualization, your going to want 64 bit Host OS with lots and lots of RAM and Virtualization Extensions on the processor. Doing it any other way is going to give average performance at best.
vmdk is an openly documented format. The most basic form is a file with drive metadata, and a flat disk image. All of the possibilities are documented though, and open for use elsewhere. Whether VirtualBox can boot it depends more on the guest OS installed into the image than it does on the image format itself.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
You can't run FreeBSD in VirtualBox because it forgets to clear some flags after an interrupt, which causes FreeBSD to notice that the hardware is in an invalid state. I don't believe this is as serious with other guests, but they may get some weird behaviour from drivers. It's been a known issue since 1.x and still isn't fixed. Someone wrote a patch for the FreeBSD kernel that clears these flags, but it's far from an ideal solution.
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Just SSH into your guest and run the apps remotely. You can run an X server on OS X or Windows. For a local machine it's even adequate to use unencrypted UDP on the loopback interface. You're likely to end up with about the same overhead as running an emulated 3D device, but without needing any special configuration.
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You mean, like "Seamless mode" in Virtualbox?
No, it says Windows guests, and Windows, Linux or Mac OS X hosts.
The state you are in while your HEAD is detached... - wait, what?
It's looking Good, on ubuntu hardy.
I Selected Host networking and it's showing up on my Lan. Especially cool since its sharing the wireless network card, thats not so easy before wired connections only could share.
USB support is greatly improved one area 2.06 was lacking was in support for the built in Webcam on the aspire one (many others too) That is now detected by the guest. As are other devices which were grayed out under 2.06
There's only a couple of minor things i'm looking to do now. in integrated desktop mode I'd like to make the windows taskbar and windows look more gnome like and scrap the bottom taskbar for gnome. To more fully integrate windows into my desktop. Anyone got any positive suggestions.
The use of vmware images may be useful too :)
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The main reason that people don't like running the 64 version of windows is actually not really due to drivers at all. It is mostly due to the 64 bit code that Microsoft put into it being a complete pile of shit. The operating systems itself (excluding drivers) is much buggier than its 32 bit counterpart.
VMWare has the management tools and the gee-whiz features in their enterprise virtualization (bare-metal hypervisor) kit.
The management tools matter when you start getting into multi-host clusters. Look up "DRS" and "Vmotion" and then start thinking about racks of servers and virtual machines that basically get rearranged to balance the hardware loads automatically -- yes, that's right, running VMs moving across hardware platforms with virtually no noticeable downtime (I think we've clocked it around 1-2ms of interruption, which you can barely notice watching a real-time animation loop and can't notice as, say, a SQL client or Outlook user). I've heard rumors from insiders that they may even do a kind of real-time high availability where they utilize the VMotion technology to mirror the same guest OS on a second host simultaneously.
They also have other management tools for HA, a desktop broker (ie, automagic desktop VM creation), etc.
IMHO their big challenge isn't more huge-enterprise features (although that's where the margins are) its capturing enough of the SMB space (the 3-4+ server shops run by consultants or do-it-all single admins) so that as these entities grow they move into the higher end product. This is why ESXi is now free-as-in-beer.
Once they figure out how to efficiently virtualize stuff like USB, SATA & graphics acceleration, we'll probably all start installing a "desktop" ESX on our machines first and then add OSes as we see fit. With the right windowing interface integrated into hypervisor management, it may really stop mattering what OS you're running.
No, the chunk of memory used by the Virtual Machine still has to be allocated by the Host OS such that the host OS knows to not allocate it to other applications meaning that you'd still face the 4G total limit unless the host OS also understood 64-bit memory space addressing.
The huge benefit of this is the ability to run 64-bit code with the additional 64-bit wide registers and instructions provided by the AMD64/x86-64 architecture.
For instance with this feature in VMware Workstation, I was able to test 64-bit OS' and software for compatibility issues before I took the plunge of upgrading my 32-bit OS to a 64-bit one.
To address your specific points:
I know it's a small victory but my VirtualBox "woohoo" moment was running XP in Ubuntu 8.10 Laptop and using the AT&T Global Client to VPN connect to work since AT&T's Linux Client only uses SSL. (If you work for AT&T Global Client Development... PLEASE add the other protocols like the Windows client!) I then used Remote Desktop to get into my machine at work and I was ready to go. Just as fast as running it off my XP game machine...
Yes, I know there are better ways to work remotely, but I never said it was a groundbreaking experience. Just a "woohoo" I can finally get to my work machine from my Linux laptop... meaning anywhere.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
ESX. Bare-metal hypervisors beat the absolute pants off linux or windows hosted hypervisors by any metric you can think of. Plus the management interface that lets you treat an entire bank of servers as a resource pool, start guest VMs on any of the pool, migrate them between hardware without powering off, and bringing VMs up automatically on another box in the pool if a server has a hardware fault - these are all areas that xen and virtualbox can't compete.
For localised single-server hossting, or workstation hosting? Sure, vmware may be in trouble. But enterprise-grade hosting with proper SANs and load-balancing physical servers hosting dozens or hundreds of guest VMs, where VMWare makes most of their money? I'm not aware of anything that competes right now.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
My experiences with VMWare's DirectX support is that it's slow and buggy. Plus, the video driver doesn't support the Vista display model, so it can't even run Vista Aero in a guest.
Meanwhile, in the business world, hardly any vendors support 64bit VPN IPSec clients which is causing great headaches for everyone. Sure we can upgrade a PIX to an ASA but the PIX is supported until 2012. Other options are running a 32bit VM, but again, you would have to have all your business related items that might need to go over that VPN on the VM. No good. Further, we have to VPN to external clients which prefer Aventail that they purchased three years ago. No go again for the 64 bit support.
This single problem prevents us for moving to 64-bit platforms on the business front.
VMware has been running 64bit VMs under 32bit host OS (on 64bit hardware) since.. 2006, even before?
I'd say look at which products people are willing to pay for, and you know who is giving who a run..
I joined two users too late.
Utter tosh. I run 64bit vista for a CAE workstation and it is rock solid and a shitload faster than 32bit XP (never tried 64bit XP) - once it's been tweaked a little (ie, turn off indexing and a few other things).
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It's a known issue. Try to build world, or portsnap update and you are likely to see it. The bug was filed against 1.6 and was still reproducable with 2.0.6. I can't produce it on 2.1, because now my FreeBSD VM aborts during the boot process (as in, the VM aborts, not the OS - the window disappears and the VirtualBox GUI reports the VM state as 'aborted'). This is with an OS X (Core 2 Duo) host, but the eflags bug has also been reproduced on Linux.
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It is? I've been running Windows XP x64 ever since it got decent print driver support (about 6 months after release) with no issues at all. Vista x64 is the only way I'll touch Vista, since it's so RAM hungry anyway. Now there are apparently some *very* broken things with how MS does their 64 bit libraries for running 32 bit code (Program Files (x86) anyone?), but in general things work well and without any major crashes or bugs.
So what was the complete pile of shit part again? Because in my personal, extensive experience with it, your statement is a complete pile of bullshit.
Does not work in Debian Etch
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Of course, I just tried this with a Pentium-D that supports x64 and not VT-x. Yes, it fails. The machine is quite happy to run Ubuntu x64 for real, but won't do it running the same Ubuntu distro in a Virtual Box VM under 32-bit Windows Vista. Just in case anyone wanted to know for sure.
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