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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.