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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."
.. opengl acceleration on windows guests on any opengl capable host! beat that vmware!
Would a 32 bit emulating a 64 be like a fat man in the 200m dash?
I can't justify purchasing a 64 box for the house, but a beefed up 32 running 64 virtually is just the ticket to get SAP on Linux up and running. Merry Christmas to me!
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
Another interesting new feature is the experimental 3D acceleration via OpenGL. From the manual:
With this new feature, if an application inside your Windows guest uses 3D features through the OpenGL programming interfaces, these will not be emulated in software (which is slow), but instead VirtualBox will attempt to use your host's 3D hardware.
This works for all supported host platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris), provided that your host operating system can make use of your accelerated 3D hardware in the first place.
The 3D acceleration currently has the following limitations:
1. It is only available in Windows XP and 32-bit Vista guests with the Windows Guest Additions installed.
2. Only OpenGL acceleration is presently available in those guests; Direct3D is not yet supported and will be added in a future release.
Aside from a clunky GUI, the thing that stood out the most for me about VirtualBox is the abysmal snapshot support. Both VMWare and Parallels allow for a snapshot tree where you can instantly jump to any powered-on machine state that you have saved. VirtualBox, on the other hand, seemed to only support a linear, multiple-level undo.
Anybody know if any progress has been made in this area?
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.
Does this mean if I have more than 4G of memory the client will actually be able to use more memory than the client can see? So I can have a full 12G client on a 16G host that only sees/uses 4G of it?
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.
Virtualbox doesn't just give VMware a run for it's money, it's considerably superior in many respects:
- It's open source
- The gtk interface is at least as good as vmware's gui
- It's considerably faster on my system (no hardware virtualisation), windows xp boots in about half the time in virtualbox than in vmware, and applications generally open/run much more snappily.
- It's considerably more stable (on linux) than vmware is. In my experience vmware crashed about 30% of the times I used it, I even got a total system crash once that needed a hard reset (I think due to problems with compiz?). It uses quite an intrusive kernel module that creates a lot of latency in the kernel. This manifests itself mostly as skipping audio when audio is playing. Virtualbox has none of these problems, it's rock solid stable and doesn't hog the cpu like vmware does.
- Virtualbox seems to need less ram than vmware, I only have 1GB of ram in my laptop and swapping was unbearable with firefox and vmware open, yet firefox, virtualbox AND other applications can coexist fine with only limited swapping.
That's all the advantages I can think of of the top of my head, the only disadvantage I can see is that vmware supports USB devices whereas the free version of virtualbox doesn't. Other than that, virtualbox is just better all round.
Sam
This is how the loudness war is killing music.
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.
I have to disagree. VirtualBox has the makings of a good product, but right now is too buggy and unreliable to be used in a production environment.
Most of the unreliability that I've encountered stems from virtual disk management. For example, if you have a virtual machine with a CD ISO mounted, what happens if you stop that machine and delete the ISO? This:
VM cannot start because the hard disk '/home/seizurebattlerobot/.VirtualBox/VDI/Windows Vista.vdi' is not accessible (Could not access hard disk image '/home/seizurebattlerobot/.VirtualBox/VDI/Windows Vista.vdi' (VERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND)).
Result Code:
NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
Component:
Console
Interface:
IConsole {ddc6fda1-a435-45ca-b43d-f9e88746e53e}
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.
The disk snapshot feature is also a mess and can result in data loss if you are not extremely familiar with how the underlying implementation works. The GUI dialogs that control snapshots are poorly documented and are definitely not production quality.
It is also not possible to shrink a virtual disk that uses snapshots. Normal GUI based activity has resulted in an inconsistent snapshot tree state that has caused data loss for me numerous times.
In short, I would recommend VirtualBox for anyone that wants a virtualization sandbox to play around in. To anyone concerned about data integrity, hates troubleshooting obscure and difficult to track down error messages, or wants to use disk snapshots at all, I would recommend waiting a few years before considering VirtualBox.
That's the truth. Sun, Xen and even Microsoft are giving VMWare a run for their money nowadays.
There's one interesting thing which has struck me, that I haven't seen any comments on. Namely, that VMWare is stuck competing between Microsoft on the one hand, and several Open Source projects on the other (with some of the Open Source projects having serious financial backing).
Being positioned between Microsoft and Open Source generally hasn't been a good spot to be in (indeed, has anyone succeeded here?). So I have to wonder how VMWare is going to stand up in the future?
I've been a big fan of VMWare in the past, as it has saved my butt more than once. However, now I find myself using Xen more, and seriously considering Sun's offerings.
To VMWare's credit, they have arguably the best person in the world for the job as CEO (at least on paper). Some might remember Paul Maritz as being one of the top people from Microsoft, as well as having led Microsoft's original *NIX strategy (I.e. Xenix). So if there's anyone who can compete there, it is him.
But still, it is not an enviable position to be in, and it makes me wonder how they are going to compete in the long term? Especially since, from a technology basis, the Open Source efforts are arguably better.
Anyone care to add some insightful comments on this? The only way that I can see VMWare winning is if everyone else screws up. While that's possible, there's a lot of money at stake in the Virtualization field, and I think the odds of that happening are low.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
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!
Sun has taken a beating lately, like everyone has, but when I look at its massively multicore Niagara and Victoria Falls systems I see real viable breakthrough in the area of massively parallel computing. With Solaris Containers on Sparc I can take an old production Solaris 8 ( or 9 ) server and literally drop it into a single core of a Niagara machine and then make the old box vanish into a puff of 1U smoke without losing anything. Heck, the new machines will run 256 threads at the same time with no time slice issues. With VirtualBox on x86 we can now park almost anything from the x86 world into a SunFire x4440 ( 16 core AMD Opteron slayer ) in 2U of rack space. The theory, that I would love to test in practice, is that you can make four racks of older gear vanish into 6U of rack space with the SunFire x4440 ( AMD Opteron based ) and the Sun T5440 Server ( 32 core and eight floating-point units per processor ). That would be 256 simultaneous threads all running in one server and 16 cores of AMD Opteron in the other. And that means Linux/Windows and Solaris all running in two machines. I may be wrong but Sun has a hell of a grip on the future multi-threaded world.
SUN of a BITCH....
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
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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