Virtual machine

[gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On 12/02/2010 10:09 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> MWare Server is and always was a terrible product.  Forget it.  You're
> using the wrong product.  It's no wonder you think virtualbox is compar=
able,
> or superior, if you're comparing it to VMWare Server.
>
> In Windows or Linux, it is VMWare Workstation.  In OSX, it is VMWare Fu=
sion,
> or Parallels.  All of these are excellent products, which IMHO easily
> outshine Virtualbox, except the fact that they're not free.
Also VMWare Player is a reasonable free desktop alternative. While it is
unable to create VMs, you can easily download a VM that you want.

One of the features I don't like about Virtualbox is in some cases the
inability to make the monitor specs available to the VM. At the last
installfest, one attendee ran VBox 3 under Windows with an Ubuntu 10.10
guest, and he was unable to get a resolution better than 800x600, but he
then installed Fedora 14 and at least got 1024x768.

While my experience with virtualization goes back to IBM's VM/370, a few
years ago I set up VMWare server on my laptop and had terrible
performance as well as instability. I subsequently removed it and
installed VirtualBox which performed very well.

One more thing is hardware virtualization assist. Most virtualization
products with use hardware virtualization assist if it is available, but
to use it, you must explicitly enable it in the BIOS. KVM and Xen
(AFAIK) do require hardware virtualization, VMWare, Virtualbox, and QEMU
do not require it. Virtualbox cannot run 64-bit VMs without
virtualization assist. Many laptops may have the virtualization assist
on the CPU chip, but no support in the BIOS.


--=20
Jerry Feldman <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
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