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VirtualBox Development At a Standstill
jones_supa writes: Phoronix notes how it has been a long time since last hearing of any major innovations or improvements to VirtualBox, the virtual machine software managed by Oracle. This comes while VMware is improving its products on all platforms, and KVM, Xen, Virt-Manager, and related Linux virtualization technologies continue to advance as well. Is there any hope left for a revitalized VirtualBox? It has been said that there are only four paid developers left on the VirtualBox team at the company, which is not enough manpower to significantly advance such a complex piece of software. The v4.3 series has been receiving some maintenance updates during the last two years, but that's about it.
are you unaware that the majority of it is open source? Therefore there's far more than 4 people looking at the code
I have vbox running a few hobby servers using its headless mode. But I do this from familiarity and a need for a user friendly cross platform service.
That said it's not a business worthy endeavor as its headless functionality is solid but there are 0 management tools that work WELL with it (phpvirualbox is fine but there are few bugs that cause major issues).
Oracle does have some of its own tools but if you're willing to pay oracle costs you are willing to pay VMWare costs too.
VirtualBox does have a headless mode, which is how I use it. Combine it with phpVirtualBox for a web-based front-end and you can admin from anywhere or any system.
Autostart, autosave, auto-snapshot, etc can be achieved with simple startup and cron scripts.
Generally agree. I use it for a handful of Windows apps I still need (like the updater for my GPS) and a few purpose specific Linux installs and it works fine for that. I'll probably keep using it as long as it still works. Worst case, KVM will probably do what I want just as well.
Sure there are other (paid) alternatives out there but VirtualBox does it's job well for me.
KVM is probably the closest alternative and is free (probably more so than VirtualBox is you go all church of Stallman mode).
Newer versions do not work with a Windows 10 host. But if you revert back to 4.3.12 everything works great. Seems like the dev team needs to be more careful about breaking changes.I know Windows 10 is not a released product yet but it rocks and is stable so I use it.
After looking at the release history, I don't see any changes in frequency of releases / updates.
https://www.virtualbox.org/pipermail/vbox-announce/
Add in test builds available showing future bits...
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Testbuilds
Since Oracle spreads it's virtualization bits between products, talking about only VirtualBox paints an incomplete picture.
VirtualBox is akin to VMWare Workstation.
OVM SPARC / x64 is akin to VMWare vSphere (or whatever name they've selected this week).
VirtualBox coupled with kernel-zones and OVM (LDOMs) baked into the SPARC hardware and OVM for x86/x64 platforms - the entire gamut is covered.
Sorry, but Phoronix did not paint a complete picture. How much did they get from EMC for spreading FUD?
VMware has better USB and SATA device support. It requires less resources to run multiple VMs (compared to virtualbox) and more readily supports virtual clusters.
Although I could certainly see how most other desktop VM users would be perfectly satisfied with Virtualbox.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Until the OS's that you want to virtualize will not operate well in it. Then you will need to switch.
It's open source and still supported by at least 4 developers so when that time comes it should be simple enough to add support for the new OS.
4 developers seems plenty to support a stable software platform even if there is a new OS every few years that needs to be added.
It's probably not enough to do a major rewrite but that's not really needed at this point. The primary thing I use virtualbox for is to support
legacy OSes. As long as they can add support for new OSes before they become discontinued, virtualbox is fine for my use case.
Also, for my particular use case, because of moore's law, performance isn't a big deal either as by the time an OS is discontinued, the
current cpus are usually an order of magnitude faster than the cpu the OS was designed for so virtualbox is plenty fast.
Funny enough, Oracle updated Vbox with a new release just 2 weeks ago. That doesn't say "standstill" to be, but more "stable and fixing bugs".
Yeah, so what if they're not making big new feature requests? They're still supporting it with updates and bug fixes, and that's a sign of a mature stable product.
Same question from me -- VirtualBox is the basis for many niche solutions, such as http://www.cuckoosandbox.org/. The command-line toolset is great, and better than I've found for other similar products; you can easily do offline analysis of product runs, easily automate running test suites across multiple OSes, create a virtual network of VBox guests, and much more. VMWare does some of this, but is really aimed ad virtualized servers and desktops, not at testing and analysis. KVM could work, but is still maturing and hasn't quire reached the same level yet -- plus, it's nowhere near as portable to any host.
I also like that VBox inherits any improvements made in QEmu.
Oracle licensing has some issues that cause smaller businesses to avoid VirtualBox like the plague. One cannot just buy one license for 100 bucks(as implied on website) instead have to pay 5k for a single license the way they work the "license magic". This type of cost for something small and simply pushes smaller companies to spend an extra day or two or more on development and use KVM, Xen, etc.
Oracle is shooting themselves in the foot over a good product.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
How about "Its working, dont fuck with it"
Wish someone had told Gnome that...
Yeah. I mean I totally buy into innovation for innovation's sake. But VirtBox just works. Sure when a new OS comes out there's work to be done to make it so it will boot in Virtual Box but still. It's worked well for me for years where when I upgrade my OS, VMWare Fusion refuses to work until I pay them (again). I also firmly believe that software which is currently working and working well for most, doesn't need constant attention and "updates" to keep it relevant. It's relevant by working. This is why we still have X11, why we still have Grub, etc. Get off your high horse about not working on something that isn't broken and join us who realize our time is better spent elsewhere unless it isn't.
It would certainly be nice if they fixed the performance of shared folders. That would make it much more practical to run multiple VM's on a single machine. See http://mitchellh.com/comparing... for some interesting info. I tried this myself, and it's true -- read performance on shared folders is many times slower than virtual disks, making them fairly useless.
Performance of USB3 sticks is more than adequate and this might be a way to create a way to create a single stick that could run multiple operating systems from bootup without needing any host storage.
You can just write a filesystem to a USB device, or you can partition it and write to it like it was an HDD. So putting multiple operating systems on a USB stick has always been not just possible, but trivial; you do it just the same way as you do it on a HDD.
I made a go at rolling my own with Ubuntu, but because I trying to do it with an older version of VMware workstation running under Windows it seemed to hose up on the USB stick installation.
Get vmware player and the gparted CD ISO, and you will have all that you need to accomplish your goal. ;) Make sure to set the boot order before installing anything because it's much easier to get into the BIOS then. Can't you point VBox at a physical drive, though?
There might be too many gotchas in terms of hardware drivers for the host Linux environment, but it seemed like a sweet solution if would work.
Once you manage getting both nvidia and ati drivers installed at the same time, the rest is child's play.
If you've got a fat USB stick, I advocate installing some lightweight edition of Ubuntu to do the job you're trying to do, perhaps lubuntu. I've never tried pointing vmware at a partition, only at an actual raw device. That worked well as long as I made it an IDE device. This is on an Ubuntu host and using a SATA HDD, and later an SSD. If I told it that the disk was SCSI or SATA then Windows 7 got confused. Telling it that the virtual disk was IDE and pointing it at my SATA disk worked great.
The question I have, though, is why not just use vmware player? It costs the same as virtualbox. Last time I checked, it was vastly superior. It doesn't involve Oracle. Seems better all around.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The core virtualbox is open source and free, but the guest tools extension pack is closed and commercial. Under restrictive use cases you are allowed to install the guest tools for personal use for yourself and not need to pay for a license. But even so much as installing it for someone else is a license violation and Oracle expects you to pay for that.
No guest tools extensions means you have no drivers for the guest VM, no shared folders, no mouse/window integration, no accelerated 2d or 3d graphics nor resolutions over 1024x768 vesa.
Whom ever installs the guest tools extension is the ONLY person legally allowed to run that copy of virtualbox afterwards (following the legal agreement when you downloaded it at least.)
If you install virtualbox and the guest extensions on a PC for your mom, mom isn't licensed to run it and Oracle wants a paid license in that case.
Installing virtualbox via scripts including the guest extensions requires a license for each install, even if you are the one using a copy.
(Academic use is somewhat excluded last I saw, but not being in academia I don't know any of those details)
There is an open source version of the guest tools, at least for Linux guests (maybe others by now.)
I'm not sure what features it lacks or differences in the drivers, but they are made by a different development team unrelated to sun/oracle.
boot a native MS-DOS 6.22 image (forget DOSBOX, if you want DOS functionality use fucking DOS!).
Well, depends on the use case. If you want to ensure your software will run on real DOS, you're right. However, in many cases, DOSBox will work better than native DOS. Run on DOSBox and never worry about not having enough conventional memory!
DOSBox will even let me install Win 3.11 drivers.
boot a native Win32 image with complete Win16 compatibility - just like you got in Win9x. Oh hell, I use win9x when I want that kind of functionality. Virtualbox lets me do that.
That's a good example of lagging development, actually. I have that need, but VirtualBox doesn't have Guest OS Additions for Win9x, which means incredibly slow and awkward performance. VMWare does have guest additions for Win9x, so I tend to use VMWare Player for that use.
do the above headless and feed a thin client or six, simultaneously, off a commodity desktop system.
Yeah, I suppose that's pretty nice. I can't vouch for it, because I haven't used that feature, but it sounds great.
let you export a disk image to a partition mounted via the host and thereafter, boot said exported image on a completely different piece of hardware with no further hacking required. I'm looking at you, DOSBOX.
Huh? DOSBox uses a folder on your box as it's C drive. Just copy that folder over to the new box, and you're done. No need to export or import anything. It's not like DOS has a registry to figure out what's installed, it just has config.sys and autoexec.bat, and whatever folders you installed things at. All of the DOSBox specific settings are really only about what hardware the DOS software sees, it has nothing to do with the host hardware (especially since the settings file now detects the CPU type you have and there's an auto setting for throttling cycles that works reasonably well). So you can copy the DOSBox settings file as well. If you use one of the many frontends, you can have a different configuration file for each game, which is another advantage over native DOS. I remember having an actual DOS Machine with a Turbo button because old games relied on clock cycles for their timing.
let you merge snapshots from specified thin clients into the service image while the image is in use.
Again, sounds impressive.
connect one remote session to another remote session from another server and directly collaborate between the two, migrating clipboard and keyboard events as you go, seamlessly between two completely different desktop environments as if you were hosting them both on the local system. Comes in handy on the odd occasion I'm moving bits of user data (eg user lists) between WAMP stacks that for some reason *have* to reside on the system partition and not the segregated data partition.
Can't vouch for it again, but sounds nice.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this post are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle.
TL;DR: I am an Oracle employee. It's an awesome place to work with above market pay, superb benefits, and a demanding but rewarding engineering culture. Virtualbox is one project in a large and growing virtualization team, creating and improving some truly amazing cutting-edge technologies that make your virtualization life better.
I'm going to share some facts as I see them, and let you draw your own conclusions instead of drawing them for you.
1. The Oracle VM and Oracle VM Virtualbox teams are one and the same within Oracle. There's a lot of cross-pollination of ideas and effort, and the virtualization team is frakking huge: HUNDREDS of developers. Not "4", as some have asserted here! .
2. There's a ton of stuff happening in virtualization at Oracle: https://blogs.oracle.com/virtu...
3. There's a substantial line-up of products that are demo'd to customers as part of "Virtualbox Appliances". Virtualbox demos are a key strategy for introducing many of our products to customers. http://www.oracle.com/technetw...
Corrollary: I manage a lot of ZFS appliances. I like them; they make my job easier, particularly at the kind of scale at which one begins measuring one's storage in exabytes. You should download the Virtualbox-based Oracle ZFS Storage Simulator and check it out. Hint: Dig into the REST interfaces and ECMAscript workflows concepts. This kind of thing is Stored Procedures for enterprise-grade storage appliances with absolutely blistering scale, reliability, and performance, and if you don't yet understand how powerful that idea is, you might be insufficiently experienced in high-end storage and databases.
4. Wim Coekaerts is a smart, friendly, and communicative dude. He also happens to be SVP over our Linux & Virtualization efforts. If you're really interested in the details of virtualization development at Oracle, you should check out his blog: https://blogs.oracle.com/wim/
Next, my opinions. No longer facts!
VirtualBox is a mature, stable product that's doing its job and -- as a GPL project -- seems to me like more a vehicle for showcasing Oracle technology than a revenue generator in its own right. That doesn't mean development has ceased! It just means that, in general, Oracle engineering teams are laser-focused on how we can make money so we can stay employed so we can keep creating really unique and useful products for our customers. Responsibilities on teams shift as need demands, and with such an enormous knowledge base in virtualization on our Engineering staff, there's no question that if a product needs a feature to benefit customers, and a good case can be made that it'll pay off, it gets the engineering resources it needs to give it a try.
The Sun transition was tough for some employees. In advance of the merger, a lot of old-timers split. A lot of younger engineers went looking for somewhere hipper and younger to work than what would become a Fortune 500 company. Many Sun managers, sensing the change in the wind as Oracle's intensely results-oriented management team integrated with them, split for positions elsewhere.
I know and work with the survivors of the merger every day. And overwhelmingly, those who've integrated into Oracle culture, shown they belong here through their productivity and attitude, and produce results consistently have built success upon success, and are valued and rewarded.
They're also a bunch of brainiacs who routinely blow my mind with deep insights into operating systems, hardware, and performance optimization.
Those who don't deal well with rapid change, high expectations, and a dogged focu
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write