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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.'"
If cost is an issue why do these reviews forget the free VMWare Server it does most everything most users would need at no cost vs workstation
Right, 2nd place because of cost alone:
With support for up to 32 virtual CPUs per VM, VirtualBox is now the class leader in terms of raw virtualization muscle. The introduction of branched snapshots is a major usability upgrade from version 3.0, while the new Teleportation feature (live VM migration) means that VirtualBox is now poised to challenge VMware and Microsoft in the datacenter.
VirtualBox rules. XP on VMWare barely ran while the same Win XP install on VirtualBox is working well.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
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.
Whether it meets some arbitrary definition of "freedom" shouldn't affect its score. If "freedom" is a desirable feature for certain users, they can certainly weigh that appropriately themselves.
Oops I was wrong about the max number of processors, it really is 4, I just tried it.
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.
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
it works well with USB devices. I use it to program Lego Mindostorms, and for Midi (to USB) keyboard input and some thumb drives.
it will mount any folder on my mac disk either permenantly or temporarily (these show us as X: or Y: or whatever). What's mildly annoying is that this is 2 step process: first you tell the VM to "add the drive" then you have to use a windows "run" command "net use x: " to tell windows about it. the second step seems strange to me, but you only do it one time.
I've had three things I could not figure out.
I never was able to get a windows media player to mount in media player mode so I could use windows DRM protected WMA files on it and manage it from within windows media player 11. Instead it only will mount as a thumb drive.
I was not able to get a virtual CD device to mount an iso image or burn an iso image (as a work around for getting the WMA files in a format I could play).
It will not burn a CD or DVD.
also I never figured out how to add my Samsung C310 printer to it or my HP multifunction printer to it. it does see them, it just never finds the drivers. However I'm pretty certain this is a windows driver problem and nothing to do with the VM.
I don't game so open GL means squat to me.
"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.
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.
That is one way to look at it.
I have used Virtual Box and I find that it getting bumped down for ease of use is a bit silly. It isn't hard to use at all. It maybe slightly more difficult to install but once installed it is trivial to use.
So lets drop ease of use and "value" from the matrix.
If you do that they tie at 8.6 for the top spot.
Before you dismiss Virtual Box out of hand take a good look at the matrix.
The only area outside of ease of use that VirtualBox got less than a 9 on was VM management where it got an 8.
Also take a look at the weights of each column. Ease of use is 25% while cost is only 10%.
I think the cost and the Ease of use are both interesting metrics. With a cost of Free I can see no reason not to try VirtualBox first. If you find the ease of use and VM management good enough for your task then you have a huge win. The other may have demo systems you can try for a limited amount of time but they will still cost you money so VirtualBox really should be the first system on anybody's list to try.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
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.
Wow. I see that they've stopped teaching good sentence and paragraph construction in college. Is it possible that this "paragraph" was cobbled together from several tweets?
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.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
You are saying it yourself:
"There are cases where VMWare may be preferable"
My system is one of those cases.
I just flat out could not get VirtualBox to work correctly. I require a very complex network setup and their networking is not as robust as VMware.
My VMs are pushed out hard, running automated tests. I got occasional lock-ups in VirtualBox while VMware runs for days and days without a single problem.
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).
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
You openly admit this?
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.
Actually, take a look at the built-in linux KVM which is getting seriously competitive in some environments. If combined with an HA-NAS solution and some custom scripts it can get quite useful in large scale deployments (as long as you do not expect pretty GUI management tools). The only serious technical weakness versus VmWare ESX is at this point lack of VMotion (which is a bit of a solution looking for a problem in many real-life scenarios anyway, given that server failures where the VM still keeps running sufficiently to be spirited away alive to another host are as about as numerous as hen's teeth).
So if you are not into some performance-fiendish-disk-io-and-cpu situations (at which point you shouldn't be really virtualizing these porkers anyway) then KVM + HA-NAS might be the trick. KVM is also capable of reading vmdk files so you can cheat using the VMWare Converter just like you would with ESX hosts, just make sure not to install VMWare tools during conversion...
Search the net, people are doing wacky things with KVM already and soon the commercial guys will be fighting an uphill battle ... which is all for the better, IMHO.