Zombie
Who's actually developing this? I can only assume Oracle haven't noticed they bought it, and the original team are keeping their heads down, and hoping they never do.
VirtualBox 5.1 debuts
Well that was quick. Mere days after announcing a release candidate, Oracle has emitted VirtualBox 5.1 Big Red reckons the following new features are worth getting excited about: Improved Performance: Significantly improved performance for multi-CPU virtual machines and networking. Bug Reporting Tool: New utility able to …
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Thursday 14th July 2016 09:12 GMT BinkyTheMagicPaperclip
Re: Zombie
Qemu is a bit of a pain to use, and KVM and Xen are a rather more involved solution than Virtualbox. Virtualbox, last time I looked, was an app you installed which 'just worked'
(although personally I found it less than reliable, so didn't bother).
I know there are various front ends that make Qemu/Xen/KVM significantly more turnkey, but they'll generally be less integrated than VMWare or Virtualbox.
On Windows there's also VMWare (works particularly well), and HyperV (built into Windows 8 onwards, as long as your CPU supports SLAT/EPT/RVI). It has to be better than both of those to succeed..
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Thursday 14th July 2016 14:54 GMT asdf
Re: Zombie
>Virtualbox, last time I looked, was an app you installed which 'just worked'
And whose performance at least for version 5.0 was terrible on Linux hosts.
>On Windows there's also VMWare (works particularly well),
Not free software at all (yes neither are some parts of VBox either) but yes VMware the superior solution in general.
>and HyperV (built into Windows 8 onwards
Which means if you will not see it at work for many years. Virtualbox is great if you want to create a quick informal *nix VM on a desktop windows host and haven't bothered to hit up work for Workstation (never like running supposedly "free" for personal use closed source stuff at work).
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Thursday 14th July 2016 15:01 GMT BinkyTheMagicPaperclip
Re: Zombie
>>Virtualbox, last time I looked, was an app you installed which 'just worked'
>And whose performance at least for version 5.0 was terrible on Linux hosts.
Last time I tried it on Windows it wasn't great either, but that's not really the point.
>>On Windows there's also VMWare (works particularly well),
>Not free software at all (yes neither are some parts of VBox either) but yes VMware the superior >solution in general.
VMware player is free for non commercial use, as is ESXi.
>>and HyperV (built into Windows 8 onwards
>Which means if you will not see it at work for many years. Virtualbox is great if you want to create a >quick informal *nix VM on a desktop windows host and haven't bothered to hit up work for Workstation >(never like running supposedly "free" for personal use closed source stuff at work).
Windows 8 has been out for some time, and there are companies using Hyper V on it, such as ourselves.
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Thursday 14th July 2016 09:34 GMT ntevanza
Free to complain
People wailing about FOSS that doesn't have their feature is always very edifying.
Re reliability, I think I've had one VirtualBox VM abend in five years, which is a lot of 9s. The only other problems I've had have been self imposed, trying to move VMs around and getting my snapshots in a knot.
It's not an enterprise tool, but maybe that helps Oracle not notice it.
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Thursday 14th July 2016 15:34 GMT John Sanders
DX11/DX12
Non-trivial to achieve, at least not until the FOSS stack (Mesa) is OGL 4.5 compliant (They are very close)
If my memory serves me right lots of code for the DX9 video driver VBox uses came from Wine, and Wine is busy implementing DX10/11 right now.
So it will be a while for that to happen.
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Thursday 14th July 2016 14:25 GMT Eldnah
VMs everywere
Vbox is easy to install, configure, and manage on Linux. And since VMware has pathetic support for running vCenter on Linux (even the web client doesn't work right), I use Vbox to run Windows, where I can then run vCenter to access all the VMs we have in vSphere. Kinda twisty poetic justice.
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Thursday 14th July 2016 15:25 GMT Mike Moyle
I use VBox on an OS X host, since: A - It's free, and; B - I can keep it running in the background for, essentially, instant access to the one or two Windows apps that I need occasionally.
Also, I work for a small municipal government department and -- as far as I can tell -- the city's system seems to assume that any request coming from a Mac inside the firewall MUST be coming from a school computer lab and so blocks access to certain websites that I often need to access (Yes; I've tried changing the browser user agent, to no avail.). Going to the said sites via the VM works without a hiccup.
As usual, I'll give the latest version a few weeks to shake out before thinking about upgrading.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
