The clever techies behind Sun Microsystems' VirtualBox hypervisor just keep plugging away on improving the product, as if the $7.4bn Oracle acquisition had not happened and as if Oracle will have anything useful to do with VirtualBox other than sit on it and keep it out of a rival's hands when the deal gets approved by the …

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Tuesday 1st December 2009 01:00 GMT Martin 6

No longer GPL

They have stopped the GPL version - it's now a free 'evaluation' license.

Of course somebody can just fork the last GPL release and add this functionality, but exactly what's the demand for a type2/desktop visualization with migration when you can have Xen for free?

Other than people running old Pentium based, none-Vtx servers.

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1. Tuesday 1st December 2009 09:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Eh?
  
  http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
  
  For as long as I can remember Vbox has been offered under both a PUEL and OSE licences. According to the download page 3.1 sources are available under the GPL, as they have been for as long as I can remember.
  
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2. Tuesday 1st December 2009 10:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Wrong
  
  I'm afraid you are mistaken. There has always been a GPL version and a "free for personal use and evaluation" (PUEL) version. Nothing changed for version 3.1, they are both available as usual: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
  
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3. Tuesday 1st December 2009 10:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Still available under GPL
  
  The Open Source Edition (OSE) of v3.1 is available under
  
  http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
  
  The regular binary distribution from Innotek/Sun has been released under the VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL) since v1.x. The OSE version is released in parallel, lacking some features of the binary version.
  
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4. Tuesday 1st December 2009 10:10 GMT Jordan Davenport
  
  What are you talking about?
  
  The Personal Use and Evaluation License (http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VirtualBox_PUEL) is only for the binaries. The 3.1.0 Open Source Edition is still licensed under the GPLv2 (http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads). The difference between the binaries and the OSE is still the same as it was with 3.0.x - OSE lacks the non-free version's RDP server and USB support (http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions).
  
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Tuesday 1st December 2009 10:04 GMT Robin Jobber

re: Martin6

Not quite sure where you're getting that idea:

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

Still lists a GPL'ed version of 3.1.0

"Open Source Edition": This is a snapshot of the OSE sources at the time of the stable 3.1.0 release.

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Tuesday 1st December 2009 10:21 GMT Ken Hagan

Re: No longer GPL

That's not what they are saying at http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions. The GPL-ed version lacks USB and RDP support, but that's no change from previous versions and what you call "evaluation" also included unlimited personal use. If you then look at http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ (section 6) you'll find the broadest definition of personal use *I've* ever seen in a software licence.

I take your point about Xen, though. VBox will only survive if it works better than the alternatives.

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Tuesday 1st December 2009 12:20 GMT The BigYin

Native speed?

Joys.

I use VB at home for study/dicking around with and it is simply the mutt's nuts. VMWare? You can keep it (although I am subjected to using that at work, shame).

Xen (and type 1 hypervisors in general) are interesting - just can't think of any reason to play with them at home.

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Tuesday 1st December 2009 14:29 GMT Anonymous Coward

A title

Now if only VBox would allow more than 128 MB Video RAM to be allocated to the VMs and also support DX10 (and maybe 11, although not much available for that >yet<), I could switch my Vista box to Debian :|

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Tuesday 1st December 2009 19:03 GMT Anonymous Coward

Nice guessing TPM

"...as if Oracle will have anything useful to do with VirtualBox other than sit on it and keep it out of a rival's hands"

You assume that Sun scratches its butt without Oracles permission these days. Your assumptions are getting old and repetitive TPM. I know El Reg is not a "real" Journal, but it's fun to read, and the guesses are right almost half the time... But you should spread rumours, not start them.

With all the layoffs at Sun, I would think that if Oracle planned on canning the project then the VB engineers would already be gone.

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Tuesday 1st December 2009 19:03 GMT Kebabbert

VB is nice

I really like VB, it is simple and fast. And the install file is 70MB, quite slim I think. How large is VMware? How many OS does VMware support?

The biggest advantage with VB, is that it the biggest player that supports the most OS out there. There might be some small open source projects that supports more, but I doubt that. Also, how many features do they lack compared to VB?

People have run on VB: haikuos, reactos, plan9, mac OS X (with some hack and a OS key), os/2, freebsd, openbsd, etc etc

Other things I like: 64 bits. Supports DX9 and OpenGL (although experimental support). Multicpu to the guests. etc etc

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Tuesday 1st December 2009 19:08 GMT David Halko

Sun VirtualBox and Sun xVM Hypervisor

Timothy Prickett Morgan writes, "Considering that VirtualBox came from a German company (Innotek) that Sun bought in February 2008 because its own Xen-based virtualization efforts were woefully behind..."

ummm... no... that is untrue... personal pet speculations should not be conveyed as fact by a reasonable writer.

There has never been any published statement from Sun confirming this writers opinion. To make a truthful statement , one would need to have a reference from Sun, none has been presented, and I have personally never seen such a statement from Sun.

Let the reader try to understand this odd line of thinking - VirtualBox was purchased last year, Sun VirtualBox just gets Live Migration, and Sun xVM Hypervisor had live migration for some time... Sun xVM Hypervisor is not "woefully behind".

Sun xVM Hypervisor, is bundled with OpenSolaris, paid production support is available, and Sun xVM Hypervisor has been able to do live migration for some time, and Sun xvM Hypervisor hosts Solaris 10 x64 operating systems... Live Migration is even available with the Xen volume sitting on top of an NFS file share on top of ZFS - that is certainly not "woefully behind"!

http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+xen/virtinstall

Sun announced development is continuing on xVM Hypervisor under x64 servers with more features due... OpenSolaris will continue to be the place to get it.

http://netmgt.blogspot.com/2009/11/opensolaris-next.html

Sun VirtualBox runs under MacOSX, Linux, and Windows - the OpenSolaris or Solaris Operating System support teams is the wrong place to put this product development. Is Sun VirtualBox "woefully behind" because VirtualBox was not bundled in Solaris 10? Doubtfully...

Contrast this to Hardware Domains, Logical Domains, and xVM Hypervisor all being consistently supported at the OS level. Since these features are not offered under MacOSX, Linux, or Windows - this is the right place to put this product development. is Sun xVM Hypervisor "woefully behind" because it was not released as a separate product? Doubtfully...

If a company is thinking about deploying Linux with an x86 Xen hypervisor to run Solaris 10, there is far less risk with considering Xen under OpenSolaris with Sun xVM Hypervisor - paid production support are available directly from Sun for OpenSolaris.

Clearly, Sun xVM Hypervisor is out, is being developed, and offers very nice features that Type 2 Hypervisors like Sun VirtualBox are starting to include. The xVM Hypervisor for x64 was never billed as a Solaris 10 feature. Contrast this to ZFS, which did not make the first cut of Solaris 10. Clearly, Sun xVM Hypervisor is not "woefully behind" if it was never scheduled to be in Solaris 10.

The Sun xVM Hypervisor for x64 was merged into the OpenSolaris source code base. One would logically conclude the xVM Hypervisor is being groomed as a feature in the next major release of Solaris (i.e. perhaps Solaris 11?) for those companies who don't want to mess with pure Open Source operating systems like OpenSolaris.

Let's watch vitualization progress!

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Thursday 3rd December 2009 17:06 GMT Anonymous Coward

this will go the way of Virtual Iron

Oracle will kill this just like they did with Virtual Iron.........Zen is dying anyways as everyone is going to KVM

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