back to article Oracle revs VirtualBox, mushrooms memory

The open source VirtualBox hypervisor for PCs and servers got a major release on Tuesday when Oracle – which controls the VirtualBox project – kicked out version 4.1. The big change with VirtualBox 4.1 is that both the hypervisor and the guest virtual machine partitions that ride atop of the hypervisor can address more main …

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  1. Gordon 10

    Most popular

    How many downloads of the various java packages I wonder?

  2. Dom 3

    Personal use...

    Importantly, "personal" does *not* mean "non-commercial".

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

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I've said it before and I'll say it one more time

    I don't care how many widgets, features and fancy frills, if it isn't *rock-sold reliable* then it's an immediate faceplant. Businesses at almost any level need *reliability*, why do you never discuss this?

    These articles keep banging on about big iron and fancy this and supercomputer that but never seem to ask what matters.

    (which is why I use VMware for personal use, from experience of too much VBox freakery, however, important note to VMware users, found that the graphics driver in the vmware tools when running windows 2008 will randomly hard-hang the VM so don't install it. Just a hint).

    1. Jim 59

      Reliability

      "Businesses at almost any level need *reliability*, why do you never discuss this?"

      The article merely informs us of a new release. It dies not talk about reliability or advocate use of Virtual Box in the enterprise. It is a news story, not a review.

    2. Peter Gathercole Silver badge
      Flame

      @AC. I take exception to the HPC comment

      I am involved in running a top 500 supercomputer site, and it is reliable. So reliable, in fact, that the customer is saying that they want to manufacturer outages on a certain service so that their users don't get to automatically expect 100% availability.

      The main secret as far as I am concerned is the old adage 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'. Really annoys me when IBM say we *have* to upgrade the software stack to remain in a supported state!

      So in answer to the comment, don't tar all services with the same brush.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        @Jim 59, @Peter Gathercole, @TPM

        "It d[oe]s not talk about reliability or advocate use of Virtual Box in the enterprise."

        From the article: "It is not clear that Oracle, [...] wants companies to use VirtualBox on those big jobs, but now it is possible – in theory, at least."

        "The article merely informs us of a new release"

        And the point of informing us of this new release with so many extra features, if not to suggest we use it, is... what? Reliability is a feature. The biggie.

        @Peter Gathercole: I don't know what you're doing with it but I managed to break it n times over. I can only speak from my experience; push it too far and it fails. If you install it with a single virtual disk and don't do anythign else then yes, it is very reliable (IME).

        Also can't quite get why you want to manufacture outages to be more common than failures on the real machines they run on (can't be more reliable, can they? and they used to use real machines, no?)

        @author. On reflection I have to retract at least some of what I said. You've been discussing HPC more often now with fair bit of time spent on energy consumption per flop and theoretical vs peak performance, which is very relevant, so I was somewhat unfair.

  4. Goat Jam
    Paris Hilton

    Virtualbox

    and server hosting?

    Don't make me laugh.

    Virtualbox is great as a desktop product, sort of like a free version of VMware Workstation but it is is the last thing I'd choose for running in a datacentre.

  5. gratou

    so no RDP to the guest from V4?

    Do I understand correctly? Time *not* to upgrade then.

  6. Ken Hagan Gold badge

    Bit of a server bias

    VB4.1 also has a guest WDDM driver so that you can use Aero in your Vista and 7 VMs. In fact, since I'm not running a server farm, but using VBox to run test machines, this is probably the only new feature of interest.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Have they resolved that issue yet...

    ... where you couldn't just drag and drop a virtual machine between installations of Virtual Box? That was pretty much the main gripe I had with it. Having to register drives first was a faff.

    1. Kebabbert

      @Dibbley

      Unfortunately, you can not drag and drop yet. You have to create a "shared folder" which both the host os and guest os can access, and then you put your file in the shared folder.

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