VirtualBox: The best virtualization program you’ve never heard of

virtualboxzt8 VirtualBox: The best virtualization program youve never heard of If you’re like most people, you probably named VMware or Xen first. Many of you probably know of one or more of the following: Parallels, QEMU, KVM, Virtuozzo and OpenVZ. However, few of you probably know about VirtualBox. And chances are if you know about VirtualBox 1.502, you’re already running it because it manages the trifecta of being good, free and, sort of, open source.

Sort of? Here’s how it works. InnoTek, a software company in Stuttgart, Germany, has released both a proprietary and a GPLv2 open-source version of the program. The VirtualBox OSE (open-source edition) has a subset of the features of the proprietary version.

VirtualBox OSE is not crippleware. It’s as full-powered a virtualization program as you’ll find today. What it’s missing are additional features, not basic functionality. You can also use the proprietary version, without charge for personal and educational use and to evaluate it for possible business purchase.

The free, but proprietary, edition gives you a built-in RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) server and USB port support. It also offers, to the best of my knowledge, the unique ability to use RDP to access remote USB devices from a local VM (virtual machine) and use local USB devices on a remote VM. It also supports the use of iSCSI network drives for use as virtual hard drives.

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Comment by l010l on November 09, 2007

yes in deed, i use VB, and have solved a ot of bypass (no need fro wine or a dual-boot).
Always wonder what would be needed to get GPU use their own driver on virtualization.

Comment by funfacts on November 10, 2007

I was searching for this kind of a blog for months now. Actually lost the hope of finding one, but here i am :) Thanks for the great articles! Looking forward for a little read after dinner :)

Comment by nazimool on November 12, 2007

I recently learned about a feature in VirtualBox 1.502 called ‘Seamless Mode’. From what I can tell, it is available in the Linux version only. It allows ’seamless’ integration of a virtualized operating system. I am running Windows XP in seamless mode on a Debian host and it is great! You’ve got to see this for yourself. No more dual-booting!!!

Comment by rj on April 21, 2008

Seamless mode is a nice toy|widget for Windows guest on Linux host.
However, VirtualBox is for primarily for UNIPROCESSOR systems.

While it can be installed on multiple CPU or multiple core systems and work without problems, the GUEST OS are not aware of more than one CPU|core.
An SMP-aware kernel will default to using one CPU|core and the V’box has to intercept the cpu calls to spread the tasks across the hardware. In effect, this means that it is another layer between the hardware and the OS. And it means that although “most” SMP-aware kernels will run just fine, there can be problems.

V’box is a toy, albeit a nice toy, but still just a toy since no self respecting iron would ever be uniprocessor these days. For that matter, all desktops will be SMP too in the not too distant future.

They say they have “planned” for SMP awareness in the future but who knows when that will be. They don’t say.

Best put the learning curve effort into something that can be useful in every environment. I wasted man-days on V’Box because they were not honest enough to state the lack of SMP support for Guest OS in the manual, or any other official doc that i could find. SHAME on them!

Comment by Morris on June 29, 2008

I use VirtualBox for my development machine because it was so easy to setup - no RTFM required - it has worked perfectly for me for months now (50% of my time using Linux host, 50% using XP guest).

The main downside is (like many other virtualisation solutions) the guest OS only sees one core. Also Innotek has been bought by Sun which usually spells stagnation to me… but I am happy to use it until I see something that will suit me significantly better.

I used kvm first, but figuring out how to access its features was too much hard work. e.g. kvm supports multi-core for the guest OS, but I couldn’t get that working.

Re: rj - AFAIK VirtualBox isn’t trying to be an “iron” server virtualisation solution. For the desktop it is quick to set up and it just works - perhaps you don’t like those features…