VMware Workstation vs. VirtualBox vs. Parallels

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy takes an in-depth look at VMware Workstation 7, VirtualBox 3.1, and Parallels Desktop 4, three technologies at the heart of 'the biggest shake-up for desktop virtualization in years.' The shake-up, which sees Microsoft's once promising Virtual PC off in the Windows 7 XP Mode weeds, has put VirtualBox — among the best free open source software available for Windows — out front as a general-purpose VM, filling the void left by VMware's move to make Workstation more appealing to developers and admins. Meanwhile, Parallels finally offers a Desktop for Windows on par with its Mac product, as well as Workstation 4 Extreme, which delivers near native performance for graphics, disk, and network I/O. 'There's some genuine innovation going on, especially in the areas of hardware support and application compatibility,' Kennedy writes. 'All support 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux hosts and guests, and all have added compelling new VM management capabilities, ranging from automated snapshots to live VM migration.'"

Comments

On the Atom processor netbook

[al0ha]

VirtualBox rules. XP on VMWare barely ran while the same Win XP install on VirtualBox is working well.

Re:VirtualBox lost...

[drinking12many]

I agree and that was my point. IF cost is an issue it should be included. If your just looking for the best product it shouldnt even be mentioned. We use the free VMware server in our patch test environment as its a free and it performs pretty well. I have some complaints about the UI as the guy does above but its functional 95% of the time with limited headache. Production side we use ESX but the costs of that just didnt make sense for a test environment for workstation patches.

Re:Everyone forgets VMware server

[Bogtha]

VMWare Server 1.x was great. For 2.x, they decided to ditch the native client in favour of an awful web interface that barely worked. That's one of the reasons why you don't hear many people singing its praises any more. It went from being useful to being absolutely horrible to use. VirtualBox is also free to use, it understands VMWare images, and it doesn't have that awful web interface.

I was wrong

[FranTaylor]

Oops I was wrong about the max number of processors, it really is 4, I just tried it.

Re:Poor reasoning in the review

[bflong]

If you actually bother to boot up and try VirtualBox you will find it very buggy compared to VMware...

Sorry, I have to disagree. I have many, many instances of VirtualBox running and I love it. I *have* had some issues, but only with some really far out edge cases. I find it to be very easy to use, and reliable. As a sysadmin, VBoxManage is awesome for scripting.

Because your evaluation *sucks*

[FranTaylor]

"VMWare assumes the *entire* point of your system is to run VMWare"

Damned straight! Why else would I buy a machine with 8 cores and 32 Gb RAM?

"Try looking at the RPM"

What RPM? VMware Workstation 7 does not ship as an RPM any more. You are behind on the times.

"Contrast with VirtualBox"

Yes I did. They BOTH install lots of strange stuff on your machine. I did not see much difference.

The big difference I found is that VMware has sufficient quality for me to do my work. VirtualBox is so buggy that I cannot do my job with it. Believe me, I tried.

Re:Poor reasoning in the review

[Neon Spiral Injector]

I was under the impression that VMs couldn't be created with Player either, so I built one in Workstation at the office, copied it to a flash drive, took it home where I installed the newest version of Player, and copied the VM to that machine.

But in the process of playing around with VMware Player, I did see an option for creating new virtual machines. Didn't explore any further, but it seems the new version does support not just playing, but building.

Re:Everyone forgets VMware server

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the same experience, but then I found out I can use the VMWare Infrastructure Client to connect to the machine running VMWare Server 2.0 (https://hostname:8333). Now it connects/manages/works nicely. It would be best if it was the VMWare-supported way of doing things, considering their terrible Web UI. My only problem with it is that you can't configure machines with the Infrastructure Client (which only supports v4 hardware) after you've modified them with the web client (which supports v7).

Re:Everyone forgets VMware server

[Zebra_X]

This was true of the preview release of 2.0. It was horrible. However, the final version of the UI is fairly decent.

Re:Everyone forgets VMware server

[csartanis]

Use VMWare server 1.x You can get it through their website and they still patch it when security flaws are found.

Only For Mac

[TheNinjaroach]

Didn't RTFA, I see. It states that Parallels Desktop 5 is available, but only for Mac. I just checked out their website and I have to agree.

Re:VirtualBox lost...

[Vendetta]

Not right. I've gotten ESXi 4 to run on every whitebox system I have tried it on. And you use the Virtual Infrastructure client to connect to it (which comes with it) but you do not need to use VirtualCenter, or vCenter as it is now called.

Re:Everyone forgets VMware server

[IgnoramusMaximus]

No it isn't. Its the same dog-awful crap that they use in the Virtual Infrastructure Client and Virtual Center used with the ESX deployments. Sloooow, cumbersome, crashing, useless crap. Orders of magnitude more pain than the old 1.x interface. One of the main reasons (in addition to exorbitant costs, total mess with license management, constant wholesale re-branding of every component with every major release - Virtual "Sphere" anyone? - and the Virtual Center Linux non-support, etc, etc) why we are in the process of ditching VmWare at most of my clients.

Re:Poor reasoning in the review

[Galactic Dominator]

If you actually bother to boot up and try VirtualBox you will find it very buggy compared to VMware, to the point of being not very usable. I spent several days trying to get VirtualBox to work for me but there were just too many problems.

No you will not. Recent Virtualbox is very stable, I haven't seen a crash on Vbox version > 3.0.1 I use it in complex networking high peak load setups without issue. Only time I can bring it down is running high load in a nested hypervisor environment.

Re:Everyone forgets VMware server

[jasonwc]

I just wanted to say that I have some experience with Virtualbox 3.1 and I disagree with the "ease-of-use" assessment of 7/10. I've played around with VMWare 7, Virtualbox, and VirtualPC, and Virtualbox is about as easy as a virtualization program can get. It has a simple GUI interface to setup your VM, provides sane settings by default, and allows lots of optimizations (like increasing # of cores used and 3D accel) easily.

I'm currently running Ubuntu 9.10 x86 in Windows 7 Professional x64, sharing 4 CPUs and allocating 512 MB of RAM to the VM. The VM runs very well and starts up incredibly fast. I'm very happy with it. It was also dead easy to install. Virtualbox also has a huge array of support for OS's - pretty much every Linux flavor, all Windows verisons from DOS/Win 3.x to Win 7/2008 R2, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, BeOS, Haiku etc. See http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Guest_OSes for a full list.

In addition, it has VT-x and AMD-V support, but it isn't required. But, the best part is that it is open source (there is a closed version with a few more features) and FREE.

I didn't find Vmware as easy to use (rated 9/10). It was fine, just not easier than Virtualbox.

Where's KVM

[snadrus]

Linux's KVM module and the "Virtual Machince Manager" (VMM) app that uses it needs to be measured on here. The interface is simple and easy.

It has shiny features too:
- live OS migration.
- Tools like "Test Drive Ubuntu" can use it to give you one-click "Test your bug in a daily build VM".
- FOSS on FOSS (Linux, BSD, etc) no-latency driver requests being passed to the Host OS, meaning only 1 context switch per Virtual-Physical interrupt.
- It's contributers are all still in the business of improving it (unlike all those mentioned except Parallels)
- It's FOSS, has very little code, is the fastest growing
- Its modules can run code for other CPUs (good for the oncoming ARMs).

Hardware virtualization helps for Windows virtualization. Please measure programs that use it (other than with Virtualbox which doesn't cooperate).

Re:On everything!

[nabsltd]

This has been a feature of every VMware desktop release I've used, since before VirtualBox was around

It's not as obvious how to do it on VMware Workstation, though.

You need to change one of the "virtual networks" to bridge to a specific adapter. In addition, on a Windows host you should disable all protocols but the "VMware Bridge protocol" from binding to that adapter. Then, you set the VM to use that virtual network.

I have my vCenter server running this way, because version 2.5 could run on a domain controller, and version 4 cannot. An install of workstation later, and vCenter is running with its own dedicated NIC.

Colour-critical work? Forget VMWare.

[isolationism]

I've been using VMware religiously for a few years now to test web pages in Windows-based browsers (I do web-based UI design on Linux and love it), but recently I've been doing more design/visual work and less markup/scripting, so I bought a deep-colour (10 bit) display with a much wider gamut than sRGB and promptly went about setting up the requisite software.

It took very little time for me to discover that VMware has absolutely no colour management capability, which completely kills any chance you have of using Windows-based, colour-managed applications like Photoshop (unless you are intentionally not using a colour-managed workflow).

The color matrix/LUT itself must obviously be created and applied in the host OS (I use Argyll and an X-Rite i1 Display 2 all on Linux, which work great) but it's useless if the Windows application isn't aware of the display profile.

I did a bit of reading and it turned out VirtualBox does support hardware display profiles for Windows guests; the same afternoon I had a Windows XP VirtualBox guest running Photoshop CS3 with full colour management and has since been working great. Strongly recommend to other Linuxy designer-types finding themselves in a similar situation.

On a related note, if ever you do create a calibrated monitor profile using Argyll that you intend to use with Firefox, use a matrix type profile, not a LUT -- Firefox apparently does not support the more accurate LUT profiles at all, but matrix profiles work just fine. I use the LUT for the general display profile but point firefox explicitly to an alternate matrix profile so that photos containing embedded display profiles show up with gamma and especially saturation levels for my display.

Re:Colour-critical work? Forget VMWare.

[isolationism]

Yes, there are actually numerous benefits you are missing, and none of them have anything to do with my "e-peen" as some other anonymous coward commented. The market for 30-and-higher bit display technologies is far from being electronic snake oil, I assure you; every movie you've ever seen in a digital cinema is projected at no less than 12 bits per colour component, for example -- considerably more colour than is supposedly "indistinguishable by the human eye" than my display is capable of reproducing.

I apologize if this comes across sounding tired and annoyed -- it is a little of both, admittedly -- but I tire of seeing this comment posted on discussion forums whenever "deep colour" displays are mentioned and hope you are genuinely interested as opposed to trolling.

It's trivially easy to illustrate how 24 bit displays are not beyond a human's ability to distinguish. Here's a simple test for you: Draw or display a gradient image from black to middle grey across the entire screen with no dithering. Can you see that there are bands of grey between those two values? You should have no difficulty whatsoever doing so (unless you have terrible vision). The fact that you can see those bands means you can easily distinguish between 16 million colours -- at least the way that colours are necessarily reproduced via red, green and blue channels.

Another easy experiment is to look at the colour "white" on your screen. Now look at a white sheet of paper held directly under a lamp, or out in direct sunlight. Sunlight is typically an order of magnitude brighter than most artificial light. If you can distinguish between 256 values between the blackest black and whitest white on your monitor, and the white outside is an order of magnitude brighter than the brightest white on your monitor, then you have just illustrated that you are theoretically capable of discerning more than 2500 shades of "grey" without even introducing any individual colours yet.

That said, the prime benefit of deep color monitors isn't that they can display all those colours simultaneously -- most software can't do that yet (despite microsoft's promise that Windows 7 would; even Adobe has as much as said that doing so would involve some serious rewrites to be able to display more than 8 bits per channel even though it can manipulate images with higher bit depths in memory).

The two primary benefits of deep colour monitors are A) A wider colour gamut than most monitors, particularly that of other LCDs; the colours are richer and more vibrant, and can completely encircle a colour space such as sRGB instead of covering most of it (which is the best most LCDs can do); and, more importantly, B) the monitor is internally capable of representing all of those colours, which is particularly important when displays are colour-calibrated.

The latter point is particularly important to prevent actual loss of colour. Remember the banding part I mentioned earlier? Well, banding becomes more prominent when displays are colour-corrected because an 8-bit monitor can only reproduce 16 million colours. When the display is calibrated, a lookup table or matrix is used to "transform" an absolute colour value -- say, a perfectly neutral 50% grey -- into what actually appears as being a perfectly neutral 50% grey on your display, which may in fact be something like (132,129,124) on your display if it has a blue cast like most LCD-backlit displays do. Because of this correction, you "lose" a lot of colours on your display because they fall outside the calibrated table, meaning your 16 million colours might be more like 12- or 13-million by the time you're done. This is unfortunately less trivially easy to experience -- especially if you don't have access to a colorimeter to calibrate your display or weren't at least provided with (and use) an ICM/ICC file by your display manufacturer -- but it is a well-documented phenomenon you'll see illustrated on LCD test suites like Lacom's (http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/gradient.php).

Re:Everyone forgets VMware server

[couchslug]

I strongly agree!

On Windows, "portable" Virtualbox is sweet and doesn't even require normal installation.

I did a clean install to VM, then .rar'ed a copy as backup. If I have problems, I can easily replace both program files and VM in one shot.

http://www.vbox.me/

On Ubuntu, installing the PUEL version of Virtualbox was easy and allows me to try out other Linux distros and run XP for when I need that.

Re:Everyone forgets VMware server

[LarryWake]

The full version is covered by the Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL), which technically speaking may be "restricted," but not very:

"Personal use is when you install the product on one or more PCs yourself and you make use of it (or even your friend, sister and grandmother). It doesn't matter whether you just use it for fun or run your multi-million euro business with it. Also, if you install it on your work PC at some large company, this is still personal use. However, if you are an administrator and want to deploy it to the 500 desktops in your company, this would no longer qualify as personal use. Well, you could ask each of your 500 employees to install VirtualBox but don't you think we deserve some money in this case? We'd even assist you with any issue you might have."

Re:Everyone forgets VMware server

[Anonymous Coward]

Newer motherboards have no support for old operating systems like Win95/98. Driver support was dropped years ago.