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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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