Notes on VirtualBox

[Rich Braun]

Having had some recent success on the hiring front, I'm back to tinkering with
some new technologies.  One of the new guys asked for a Mac computer (vs. the
standard openSuSE desktop that I try to get people to use) and then set up
VirtualBox rather than Parallels or Fusions.

None of us has been happy with VMware Inc's products on the desktop so this
seemed like a good time to make the switch, now that I've got onsite support
for Sun's open-source product.

My early experience with VirtualBox over the past 10 days has been VERY
positive.  It's basically a slam-dunk superior technology over VMware Server
1.0.9 and 2.0 that I'd been using the past 3 years.

Here are some of my notes on specific things the folks at Sun and/or the
open-source community have done right vs. VMware's closed solution.  (Just to
be clear about how my setup at both home and office, and that of 2 or 3
coworkers: the host O/S is openSuSE 11.2 or Snow Leopard 10.6; the client O/S
is Windows XP or Windows XP64; we're using Sun's Guest Additions; the current
version is 3.0.6.)

* Time-sync with the host works; under VMware the guest O/S clock advances at
least 10% faster than real-time

* Copy/paste and mouse integration are seamless in both directions (i.e. you
can copy/paste from/to a guest app, and you can select windows with the mouse
under either environment)--this also works well under VMware Server

* The guest O/S runs stable for weeks; I found that under VMWare Server my
guest O/S would gradually slow down due to a virtual-memory bug of some sort,
requiring a weekly reboot

* The guest O/S only captures the keyboard when the window manager (KDE or
Gnome) has set the window focus to VirtualBox; VMware Server captures it
whenever the mouse is within the bounds of even the most tiny visible section
of the VM window, even if another overlapping window has focus--this leads to
a lot of misery if you start typing and accidentally delete something within
your VMware-based application)

* A minor annoyance with VirtualBox: in order to get music to play without
stutter, I had to limit my VM to a single processor instead of 2 or more.
* There is a relatively straightforward way to export VM images and copy them
to another machine; VMware Server allows you to do this but there are some
hoops to jump through, and there's no guarantee you'll be able to import them
in a future or alternative version of any of VMware Inc's products

* Integration with the openSuSE host O/S is seamless out-of-the-box; with
VMware server you have to download kernel modules which may or may not work
with the latest/greatest version of the openSuSE distro, and which prevent you
from doing upgrades of the host O/S as they become available.

Hope this is helpful.  My perception is that the applications running within
the VM are more stable and run a little faster but I haven't done any
benchmarks.  I have an ancient version of Quicken that doesn't work within
VMware Server (writing the data to disk is slow, and often suffers corruption)
but it works fine within VirtualBox using the exact same guest O/S.

Would love to hear others' comments.

-rich