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.. and .. (Score:5, Interesting)
.. opengl acceleration on windows guests on any opengl capable host! beat that vmware!
Re:.. and .. (Score:4, Insightful)
The part of this I am looking forward too is the future plan to allow DX using the host hardware iwthin the guest. So I can finally drop a native windows install for gaming.
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Re:.. and .. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:.. and .. (Score:5, Informative)
VirtualBox is free. VMWare Workstation costs money (the free Server products don't support 3D graphics).
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Re:.. and .. (Score:5, Informative)
The difference is VMWare emulates DirectX, using Wine.
What are you talking about? VMWare does no such thing, there is no connection between vmware and wine whatsoever.
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Re:.. and .. (Score:4, Informative)
What are you talking about? VMWare does no such thing, there is no connection between vmware and wine whatsoever.
He's probably thinking of Parallels:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallels_Desktop_for_Mac#Wine_controversy [wikipedia.org]
http://wiki.winehq.org/Parallels [winehq.org]
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Re:.. and .. I bet VMware and ms are muttering... (Score:4, Funny)
SUN of a BITCH....
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Re:security issues? (Score:4, Informative)
Thus far, my virtual boxes have all been on a private network. I'm not even sure if they see each other, though I've not really tested that. I'm not even really sure how to open up the guests to the public network, though I'm 100% positive that it can be done. It's just that the defaults are all pretty secure.
That all means that your host is acting as a NAT router (by default anyway) and thus all the firewall that the host has will protect the guest(s).
Yes, if your guest gets infected, it's inside the firewall. Though, like I said, I'm not sure it can see the other guests, just the host. However, it's fairly easy to solve: turn off the VM, and roll it back to a clean state. I mean, if you're paranoid enough to be worried about such issues, you'll have old states which are known-good to roll back to. However, I've turned off pretty much all of WindowsXP's protections because it's hiding inside my Linux box, behind a cable-router (another NAT). The ability for something to get in and infect it is pretty much nil. Especially as I don't use IE or Outlook inside there (I use kmail for email, and firefox and konqueror on Linux for browsing, so no need) either.
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what about performance fall off? (Score:4, Funny)
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Great, needed this as of last week.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great, needed this as of last week.. (Score:5, Funny)
Getting SAP at home for Christmas is worse than getting beat over the head with a stocking full of coal.
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Re:Great, needed this as of last week.. (Score:4, Funny)
Give the market a few years and the cost of the fossil fuels will make the stocking worth it.
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Re:Great, needed this as of last week.. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Great, needed this as of last week.. (Score:4, Funny)
Getting SAP at home for Christmas is worse than getting beat over the head with a stocking full of coal.
Could be worse......Microsoft Small Business Manager anyone?
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Re:Great, needed this as of last week.. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Great, needed this as of last week.. (Score:4, Informative)
Why most people are wary running 64 bit is beyond me. Only issue I have is lack of 16 bit support for really old DOS stuff which doesn't bother me. NVidia has drivers for 64 bit Vista/XP, most motherboards support it and most decent hardware has had drivers.
While this falls under cool category, if your running any serious virtualization, your going to want 64 bit Host OS with lots and lots of RAM and Virtualization Extensions on the processor. Doing it any other way is going to give average performance at best.
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Re:Great, needed this as of last week.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Great, needed this as of last week.. (Score:5, Informative)
A quick check of the user manual states hosting a 64-bit OS requires 64-bit hardware. So I think you are out of luck.
This update is really just adding support for running 64-bit on systems where the host OS is not taking advantage of 64-bit hardware they already have.
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Re:Great, needed this as of last week.. (Score:4, Interesting)
You are still not correct. Running 64-bit OS requires 64-bit hardware with internal processor support. That means people, like me, with AMD Mobile Sempron (64 bit) are out of luck because processor doesn't support "AMD-v". On Intel machines, it is called "VT-x".
You might need to enable it via BIOS first.
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Hardware 3D acceleration (OpenGL) (Score:5, Interesting)
Another interesting new feature is the experimental 3D acceleration via OpenGL. From the manual:
With this new feature, if an application inside your Windows guest uses 3D features through the OpenGL programming interfaces, these will not be emulated in software (which is slow), but instead VirtualBox will attempt to use your host's 3D hardware.
This works for all supported host platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris), provided that your host operating system can make use of your accelerated 3D hardware in the first place.
The 3D acceleration currently has the following limitations:
1. It is only available in Windows XP and 32-bit Vista guests with the Windows Guest Additions installed.
2. Only OpenGL acceleration is presently available in those guests; Direct3D is not yet supported and will be added in a future release.
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Re:Hardware 3D acceleration (OpenGL) (Score:4, Insightful)
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Improved snapshots? (Score:5, Interesting)
Aside from a clunky GUI, the thing that stood out the most for me about VirtualBox is the abysmal snapshot support. Both VMWare and Parallels allow for a snapshot tree where you can instantly jump to any powered-on machine state that you have saved. VirtualBox, on the other hand, seemed to only support a linear, multiple-level undo.
Anybody know if any progress has been made in this area?
Re:Improved snapshots? (Score:4, Insightful)
This feature is allegedly in progress.
I completely agree - I have a pair of mutually-incompatible versions of the same application that won't co-exist on the same Windows machine, so I set up a VBox machine to put them on. I had to clone the base install, about 2GB, rather than just making a snapshot and installing either version on top of that snapshot and snapshotting them. If you want both versions, you have to sacrifice another 2GB of disk space or install one version natively (which isn't exactly convenient - one of the major reasons for having the VMs is that it's a complete pig to install correctly).
It's not like the virtual disk model is unprepared for it - it does support immutable and delta disks, and uses them when taking snapshots. You are allowed multiple nested snapshot levels. For reasons I don't grok this has not been translated into branching snapshot support.
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Good Alternative (Score:4, Insightful)
I have found that VirtualBox is a perfect alternative to VMware's expensive Workstation product. Before a friend told me about VirtualBox I was using VMware's Server free product as to how Workstation was meant to be used and not as a server side virtualization solution as VMware expected. So as soon as I checked out VirtualBox I dumped the ever-so-getting bloated Server program suite. I did previously pirate Workstation a couple of years ago before the free Server got released and decided I would try to go legit at that time which made it easy since Server and Workstation were compatible with each other on virtual machine files. As for Workstation product its ~$200 price tag is just way too expensive for my taste.
Now I'm using VirtualBox and I really do like it a lot. It seems to even be less resource intensive than VMware's offerings. Now the question is has anybody tried, or even if possible, to convert a VMware virtual machine to a VirtualBox machine?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
VirtualBox is supposed to be able to open up VMDKs. Whether or not one can get it to boot on the other hand........
Re:Good Alternative (Score:5, Informative)
Good luck!
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Speak for yourself (Score:4, Insightful)
But the ability to take multiple, branching snapshots is worth the price of admission alone. Version 6.5, which they pushed out a short while ago, has a new featured called "Unity mode", which basically takes programs running in the Guest and draws them on the Host so they act like any other program running on your host.
If you are a developer who uses virtual machines every day, $200 is a bargain for a tool like Workstation.
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Re:Speak for yourself (Score:4, Informative)
You mean, like "Seamless mode" in Virtualbox?
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I thought VMWare already did that (Score:5, Informative)
I have an Athlon64 but run a 32 bit OS. I tried running a 64 bit virtual machine using VMWare Server 1.0.x a year or so ago and it worked. The performance was not noticeably poor.
So... assuming I haven't missed anything too obvious, my response would be "No, vmware is not getting a run for their money." Not today anyways.
Re:I thought VMWare already did that (Score:5, Interesting)
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Network bridge (Score:3, Informative)
was the reason why I tossed out Virtual Box.
It was prone to problems, and became so annoying I ended up buying a license of VMWare.
There is also one area which is very unstable - OpenBSD support. It crashes the latest versions of OpenBSD, reports out-of-disk errors etc. OpenBSD is definitely more picky on the hardware it runs due to its strong security features, which Virtual Box doesn't appear to implement properly to make it look "real enough"
Sun has recognised problems with OpenBSD but has said its so far down the important-list it won't bother for some time.
Memory supported? (Score:5, Interesting)
Good product, not Enterprise ready yet (Score:4, Informative)
I've been trying out VirtualBox for a while. VMWare had recently updated to v2.0 and had some annoying problems with the new tomcat based web front-end. It was unusable and drove a lot of people to other options. This was why I'd looked at VirtualBox.
It is easy to install and runs most OSes as a host. I tested the last two versions on CentOS 5.2 on 64bit and 32bit. The 32bit version running on my Inspiron E1505 laptop had issues with CPU utilization. No matter what was running (or not running) in the guest, it would completely spike the machine to 99% utilization. Fiddling with the CPU virtualization settings and other BIOS features had no effect.
Anyhoo, VMWare released an update that fixes the Tomcat issues. Xen is running great. Right now I don't have a lot of reason to switch, but VirtualBox does look very promising.
Virtualbox is superior to VMware (Score:4, Interesting)
Virtualbox doesn't just give VMware a run for it's money, it's considerably superior in many respects:
- It's open source
- The gtk interface is at least as good as vmware's gui
- It's considerably faster on my system (no hardware virtualisation), windows xp boots in about half the time in virtualbox than in vmware, and applications generally open/run much more snappily.
- It's considerably more stable (on linux) than vmware is. In my experience vmware crashed about 30% of the times I used it, I even got a total system crash once that needed a hard reset (I think due to problems with compiz?). It uses quite an intrusive kernel module that creates a lot of latency in the kernel. This manifests itself mostly as skipping audio when audio is playing. Virtualbox has none of these problems, it's rock solid stable and doesn't hog the cpu like vmware does.
- Virtualbox seems to need less ram than vmware, I only have 1GB of ram in my laptop and swapping was unbearable with firefox and vmware open, yet firefox, virtualbox AND other applications can coexist fine with only limited swapping.
That's all the advantages I can think of of the top of my head, the only disadvantage I can see is that vmware supports USB devices whereas the free version of virtualbox doesn't. Other than that, virtualbox is just better all round.
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Re:Virtualbox is superior to VMware (Score:5, Informative)
The VirtualBox GUI is written with Qt [ubuntu.com], not GTK.
I'm using VirtualBox to run 32 bit Windows XP on a 64-bit Linux machine. VirtualBox 2.0 runs really well for me. I'm glad I can use an open-source package for this.
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Re:Virtualbox is superior to VMware (Score:5, Insightful)
My anecdotal evidence disagrees with all of your anecdotal evidence. I have never had a problem with VMWare stability, RAM usage, CPU utilization or interface.
But really, your entire argument is crap the second you use the term "snapily" or "snappy." If you're angry at VMWare, and you install VirtualBox, your first impression will be that it's so much "snappier" even if the two are neck and neck. This is a stupid term, stop using it.
Sorry, but your points are pretty worthless because you don't back any of it up, you just cry "unstable" and we're all supposed to agree with your blind rage.
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"Giving VMWare a run for their money" (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the truth. Sun, Xen and even Microsoft are giving VMWare a run for their money nowadays.
There's one interesting thing which has struck me, that I haven't seen any comments on. Namely, that VMWare is stuck competing between Microsoft on the one hand, and several Open Source projects on the other (with some of the Open Source projects having serious financial backing).
Being positioned between Microsoft and Open Source generally hasn't been a good spot to be in (indeed, has anyone succeeded here?). So I have to wonder how VMWare is going to stand up in the future?
I've been a big fan of VMWare in the past, as it has saved my butt more than once. However, now I find myself using Xen more, and seriously considering Sun's offerings.
To VMWare's credit, they have arguably the best person in the world for the job as CEO (at least on paper). Some might remember Paul Maritz as being one of the top people from Microsoft, as well as having led Microsoft's original *NIX strategy (I.e. Xenix). So if there's anyone who can compete there, it is him.
But still, it is not an enviable position to be in, and it makes me wonder how they are going to compete in the long term? Especially since, from a technology basis, the Open Source efforts are arguably better.
Anyone care to add some insightful comments on this? The only way that I can see VMWare winning is if everyone else screws up. While that's possible, there's a lot of money at stake in the Virtualization field, and I think the odds of that happening are low.
Re:"Giving VMWare a run for their money" (Score:5, Informative)
VMWare has the management tools and the gee-whiz features in their enterprise virtualization (bare-metal hypervisor) kit.
The management tools matter when you start getting into multi-host clusters. Look up "DRS" and "Vmotion" and then start thinking about racks of servers and virtual machines that basically get rearranged to balance the hardware loads automatically -- yes, that's right, running VMs moving across hardware platforms with virtually no noticeable downtime (I think we've clocked it around 1-2ms of interruption, which you can barely notice watching a real-time animation loop and can't notice as, say, a SQL client or Outlook user). I've heard rumors from insiders that they may even do a kind of real-time high availability where they utilize the VMotion technology to mirror the same guest OS on a second host simultaneously.
They also have other management tools for HA, a desktop broker (ie, automagic desktop VM creation), etc.
IMHO their big challenge isn't more huge-enterprise features (although that's where the margins are) its capturing enough of the SMB space (the 3-4+ server shops run by consultants or do-it-all single admins) so that as these entities grow they move into the higher end product. This is why ESXi is now free-as-in-beer.
Once they figure out how to efficiently virtualize stuff like USB, SATA & graphics acceleration, we'll probably all start installing a "desktop" ESX on our machines first and then add OSes as we see fit. With the right windowing interface integrated into hypervisor management, it may really stop mattering what OS you're running.
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Re:"Giving VMWare a run for their money" (Score:5, Informative)
ESX. Bare-metal hypervisors beat the absolute pants off linux or windows hosted hypervisors by any metric you can think of. Plus the management interface that lets you treat an entire bank of servers as a resource pool, start guest VMs on any of the pool, migrate them between hardware without powering off, and bringing VMs up automatically on another box in the pool if a server has a hardware fault - these are all areas that xen and virtualbox can't compete.
For localised single-server hossting, or workstation hosting? Sure, vmware may be in trouble. But enterprise-grade hosting with proper SANs and load-balancing physical servers hosting dozens or hundreds of guest VMs, where VMWare makes most of their money? I'm not aware of anything that competes right now.
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Solaris Containers on Sparc and VirtualBox x86 (Score:5, Interesting)
Title misleading (Score:4, Insightful)
The title of this post is rather misleading. It implies VirtualBox can run a virtualized 64 bit machine on a 32 bit processor and VMWare cannot. Neither of these are true. It can now host a 64 bit guest VM when the host OS is 32 bits.
Support for 64 bit VM's under 32 bit host OS's has been standard in VMWare's entire line ever since they included 64 bit guest support. Even the service console through ESX 3.5 is a 32 bit VM (Though it's not really fair to call it the "Host" OS)
AFAIK, virtualizing 64 bit guests does still require Intel VT or AMD Pacifica support on the CPU regardless on all products that support 64 bit guests.
Re:Host based networking? (Score:5, Informative)
It means that the virtual network adapter can get IP connected without resorting to NAT. This was usually done by bridging a physical interface to a tun device and setting that tun device as VirtualBox's network device. Setting up this bridge requires using a script outside of VirtualBox to get everything set up. Now VirtualBox can do it from the GUI with no scripting required. In short, one can dedicate a physical NIC to VirtualBox by bridging it or allow VBox direct access to the host NIC.
The easy way to do networking with virtuals is to use NAT to pass TCP traffic to the virtual from the host's IP connection. That suffices for web surfing and other apps that don't severely exercise networking but it doesn't work well for things like VPN clients.
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Re:Host based networking? (Score:5, Informative)
If you wanted your VM to have an IP and appear as if it is a real machine on the network many people used to have to follow the 100 odd lines of documentation here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VirtualBox#Networking [ubuntu.com]
Now they can just start it and it works out of the box.
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Re:How to Install Virtualbox 2.1 in Ubuntu (Score:4, Funny)
Odd. I feel spoiled.
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Re:Good products (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to disagree. VirtualBox has the makings of a good product, but right now is too buggy and unreliable to be used in a production environment.
Most of the unreliability that I've encountered stems from virtual disk management. For example, if you have a virtual machine with a CD ISO mounted, what happens if you stop that machine and delete the ISO? This:
VM cannot start because the hard disk '/home/seizurebattlerobot/.VirtualBox/VDI/Windows Vista.vdi' is not accessible (Could not access hard disk image '/home/seizurebattlerobot/.VirtualBox/VDI/Windows Vista.vdi' (VERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND)).
Result Code:
NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
Component:
Console
Interface:
IConsole {ddc6fda1-a435-45ca-b43d-f9e88746e53e}
The only way to get the machine into a usable state again is to manually edit the virtual machine definition, which is a lot more complex than one would immediately think. Just look at the VirtualBox bug tracker for some horror stories.
The disk snapshot feature is also a mess and can result in data loss if you are not extremely familiar with how the underlying implementation works. The GUI dialogs that control snapshots are poorly documented and are definitely not production quality.
It is also not possible to shrink a virtual disk that uses snapshots. Normal GUI based activity has resulted in an inconsistent snapshot tree state that has caused data loss for me numerous times.
In short, I would recommend VirtualBox for anyone that wants a virtualization sandbox to play around in. To anyone concerned about data integrity, hates troubleshooting obscure and difficult to track down error messages, or wants to use disk snapshots at all, I would recommend waiting a few years before considering VirtualBox.
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Re:Good products (Score:4, Informative)
The only way to get the machine into a usable state again is to manually edit the virtual machine definition, which is a lot more complex than one would immediately think. Just look at the VirtualBox bug tracker for some horror stories.
This confused the hell out of me the first time it happened on a virtual CD mount. But it only took a few minutes to realize that all that needed to be done was to disable the CD from the GUI. It should be just as easy to disable a hard drive.
While it is bad form to refuse to boot over something so trivial I don't see this as a show stopper.
Disclaimer: I'm not using VirtualBox in a production environment.
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Re:Good products (Score:5, Informative)
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