Oracle punts first VirtualBox x64 hypervisor VirtualBox made the cut in the wake of the acquisition of Sun by Oracle back in January, and Wednesday marked the first release of what is now called Oracle VM VirtualBox. With VirtualBox 3.2 (and no one is ever going to call it Oracle VM VirtualBox, so let's get that straight), the software engineers have tweaked the type 2 ( …
Has it stopped sucking yet, or are they continuing their theme of adding new features and not bothering about basic stability? The statement that it runs everything is a complete lie.
I might bother to try the new release, but so far I'd much rather run VMWare's product set than VirtualBox.
I have never had that many problems with it insofar as stability goes, although the performance has (historicly) been rather disappointing. I have not tried this release, as I am already commited to VMWare ESXi (Type 1), Linux VServers and Solaris Zones (OS Level), and Citrix XenAPP (Application Virtualization).
The largest reason for my commitment to VMWare and Citrix is that clients ask for it. An adiquate solution that they want, is going to make me more money then a excellent solution I have to sell. What can I say? I like making money, and NOONE has EVER come to me asking if I can host VirtualBox.
What I'm getting desperate about is for a headless version like the free (as in beer) "VMWARE Server ESX".
In my opinion is the only thing which I miss in VirtualBox, and the only thing holding a much deserved adoption rate.
From time to time, I have to build virtual machines for small customers, and they will be much better served by Virtualbox.
Terribly handy for test environments for web development - install three copies of Windows, one with IE6, one IE7 and one IE8 under a headless Ubuntu/Virtualbox system - then just RDP to them using different RDP ports from Virtualbox itself, rather than the guest OSs RDP server.
Works a treat, and just needs one Core2Duo machine with a few gigs of RAM.
I do like virtualbox, but I tend to use XenServer for anything requiring stability - Layer1 hypervisors for the win.
Steven R
In Linux I can do some init.d scripts to start stop VM's, also it is more complicated for you to check D-BUS signals as to when the computer is shutting down than it is for VBOX developers to write some blob to do it.
But what about Windows? A similar approach to the "VMWARE server ESX" is more desirable. Shall I make my own service to start stop VM's?
Oracle have not changed the generous licence terms either. You can use it for business purposes, as long as it's still "personal use":
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ
And even then, if you want to make a large-scale commercial deployment, you can forgo some features and use the FLOSS version.
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