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?

[kschendel]

I use VirtualBox to host linux and winders VM's on a Mac laptop. It's free, and my other alternatives aren't. All I care about is whether it works, and I'm not all that interested in graphics acceleration and the like. So I hope it sticks around, even if it "stagnates".

Re:Does It Matter?

[CodeReign]

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.

Re:Does It Matter?

[thedbp]

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.

Re:Does It Matter?

[rwa2]

For basic workstation stuff it's fine.

It's also pretty heavily used for development and test of server deploys. A lot of DevOps types are trying to use VirtualBox to build disposable test clusters for their applications, and has been the default and one of the best supported engines for vagrant.

Unfortunately, a lot of app footprints are starting to rely on deploying other "appliance VMs" in your VM (yo dawg), and VirtualBox is still straggling behind the others on implementing some form of nested VM capability. https://www.virtualbox.org/tic... So it's kinda getting to a point of having a large and growing number of server apps that you won't be able to use VirtualBox to set up a local development and test environment for things that involve, say, using a Stackato PAAS, or a FEO appliance, or an Apigee API gateway appliance, etc. to pick a bunch of essential pieces from recent memory. At least not without a lot of work to host those VMs directly on VirtualBox and not looking or working at all like they would when they hit production.

Re:Does It Matter?

[jythie]

There is something to be said for 'fine as is'. Changes can cause bugs, changes can cause incompatibilities, changes can require updating skills to understand their impact or how configuration has been altered. When all you need is a tool for completing a task without heavy requirements, stable and predictable can be a real selling point.

One of the reasons I like VirtualBox is it changes so little. I have to worry very little about having to look up new things when all I need is a quick drop in solution for something small. Every time I go back to KVM I feel like I have to go find out 'ok, so how does it work NOW?' and then make sure I find documentation and forums talking about the KVM version in relation to the distribution and its version I am using.

Oracle ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Where software goes to die

Re:Oracle ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle is busy converting VirtualBox to run in Java.

4 paid developers yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

are you unaware that the majority of it is open source? Therefore there's far more than 4 people looking at the code

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.

False story

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:VMWare is worth the money

[jedidiah]

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.

Not at a standstill, just no major features

[tlhIngan]

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.

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.