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.

Comments

Does It Matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Legitimate question. I like VirtualBox and have used it for a long time, but as the summary said there are good alternatives available which are improving. As far as I know the only real "killer" feature of virtualBox is its OpenGL acceleration, and we'll probably see that in KVM and friends soon enough. Besides that, VirtualBox basically does what it's supposed to do at this point. Even if it stands still, it'll still be useful for awhile (I know I find no compelling reason to switch right now).

Are there some other core VirtualBox features I'm not aware of that keep people pinned to it? If not, I say let it stagnate and eventually be replaced.

Re:Does It Matter?

[TWX]

I only use vbox for local VMs, like when I need to emulate a Windows machine on my Linux box for some Windows-only software that I have to deal with from time to time. I'm not the VM guy at work, but there are lots of virtualized servers running headless on some big blade systems, does vbox do that or is that pretty much out of its scope?

I agree, for basic workstation stuff it works fine as-is.

Re:Does It Matter?

[MachineShedFred]

Parallels really kinda sucks. Of the three major hypervisors available for OS X, it's the worst of them and that's with VirtualBox being stagnant for a year+. No support for OVAs whatsoever. If you virtualize OS X, you can't use keyboard shortcuts without the hypervisor thinking that Cmd+Q was meant for it, rather than an app in the guest OS. And yes, it doesn't do very nice things with thermal management on your hardware.

VMware Fusion works pretty good, but costs $. VirtualBox, for a time, was actually better than VMware Fusion and free. The guys at VMware have fixed that though.

Re:Does It Matter?

[Immerman]

The big features for me are the OpenGL and cross-platform support. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I've gotten the sense that Virtualbox is targeted more at the personal / local user, and is fairly mature in it's niche. Occasionally I'll encounter some OS that won't run in it (seems like recently the Mint live CD wouldn't get past th Grub stage, or maybe it was Xubuntu), but by and large it's far more convenient than many of the alternatives. Just migrated a friend's XP system to MS VirtualPC and discovered you can't even mount a folder as a virtual drive - a basic integration feature in most every virtualization/emulation program since... hell at least since the days when emulating C64s and Apple 68000s on the PC was cutting edge.

Honestly at this point is seems like the VirtualBox team has two options - accept that it's mature software in it's niche, and just needs a bit of maintenance here and there to fix the occasional bug and maintain compatibility with evolving OSes, or jump off the deep end and try to compete with VMWare, etc. in the corporate data center. I'm no virtualization expert, but frankly it seems to me that it would be sort of silly doing the latter - data-center virtualization has come a long way since Virtualbox was created - hypervisors, large-scale maintenance, etc. It seems like VBox would be hard pressed to be more than an also-ran in that market.

On the other hand for personal VMs, where compatibility, ease of use, and host-OS integration are of primary importance, I haven't found a better alternative. Though I'll admit I really wish it supported Virtual PC-style undo disks - that's a wonderful feature for experimenting with new/questionable software, especially stuff that may tinker with the OS.

If it ain't broke...

[gabereiser]

don't fix it. I mean sure I'd like more features and stuff, but it works out of the box. No tweaking (other than to guest vm's) or anything necessary. It just works. Sure there are other (paid) alternatives out there but VirtualBox does it's job well for me.

Re:If it ain't broke...

[ihtoit]

that will be the point where I'll look for an alternative. As for right now, Virtualbox will, for me:

  - boot a native MS-DOS 6.22 image (forget DOSBOX, if you want DOS functionality use fucking DOS!).
  - 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.
  - do the above headless and feed a thin client or six, simultaneously, off a commodity desktop system.
  - 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.
  - let you merge snapshots from specified thin clients into the service image while the image is in use.
  - 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.

This is no surprise...

[petergriffinismyhero]

Who in their right mind would willingly submit to anything from Oracle? Have you ever been audited by them? Horrible company. They have some great products, but the company itself is a nasty evil entity that thinking people avoid like the plague unless they have absolutely no other choice.

VMWare is worth the money

[soft_guy]

After struggling with VirtualBox for a while, I broke down and bought VMWare. I use it for running Linux and running other versions of MacOS X on my Mac. I have found it to be well worth the money. In general, I like free software and I don't mind something that is a little harder to use if the non-free alternative is expensive, but at $79 VM Ware has saved me so much time its well worth it.

VirtualBox has been excellent, but needs QA

[DigitAl56K]

I user VirtualBox all day every day for fairly complex tasks, and it has performed admirably, yet it is sorely in need of QA help. Major releases happen with auto-update notifications and then you realize that your old snapshots can't be started, using a debugger blows up the VM, sometimes snapshots don't save properly even though it looks like they did, etc. etc. Then you have to dig out the last working version, which came out 6 months back, to get up and running again.

Aside from this "upgrade gamble", which I put squarely on a lack of beta releases, VirtualBox is fantastic. Hardware accelerated graphics with full Aero support, fast virtualization, shared clipboard and files, attaching USB devices - it's everything you need in a friendly UI that anyone can work with.

It'll be a tragedy IMO if it's left to rot.

For anyone interested, I find the last stable version to be 4.3.12 (on Windows).