We were just tipped off to this free open source virtualization. From the authors home page (Link @ The Bottom of Post):
Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux and Macintosh hosts and
supports a large number of guest operating systems
including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista),
DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD.
It looks like they released a new version last month:
This new version brings hundreds of improvements, more than any update since the
first official release in January 2007. Among the new features are full support
for 64-bit Linux hosts, RDP session shadowing, clipboard synchronization and
easier Linux host interface networking. In the storage department, VirtualBox
now supports VMware disk images (VMDK) natively and can give virtual machines
access to physical disks and partitions (“raw disk support”). The graphical user
interface has received more polish and has now been translated into 12 languages
(German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Arabic,
Russian, Japanese, Traditional Chinese and Chinese). Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
(RHEL5) and Xandros Desktop 4.1 are now officially supported; support for
FreeBSD and OpenBSD guests has been improved. As with its predecessors,
VirtualBox 1.4.0 is available both as Open Source under the GPL as well as under
a commercial license which, in most cases, allows you to use the product free of
charge
Some comments from apparently happy users:
- *.vmdk support is a great plus! Now the step from VMware to VirtualBox is really small. And a great plus for the ease of installation, vmware is a lot more complicated.
- Ever tried VMware on XP Home (like my poor Laptop)? You need Microsoft IIS wich is only available for XP Pro. So VirtualBox is a nice alternative here.
- Damn Small Linux 2.0 works damn well in VirtualBox!
We just loaded it up on Windows Xp and we are going to give a few OS’s a run for their money… Any requests? [Virtual Box]
Posted in Uncategorized 
Tags: 
A very nice idea for sure, and guaranteed to keep the pressure on VMWare, which is good.
But I don’t really see the advantage of it at this time over VMWare because of it’s free server product which allows you to create VM’s.
With that said, this is partially as a result of VMWare’s work to create an open standard for VM’s.
Competition is good, and VMWare gets that. Open Standards are good, VMWare gets that. That is why VMWare gets my $ right now. We’ll see how long they keep doing it and how long they keep making the rest of the players in the Virtual Machine sector eat their lunch.
VMWare is the grand daddy of the Virtualization world but for the novice, the cheapo or the open source fanatic this program is right on par with VMWare.
I noticed a slight speed increase in using vista virtually inside xp.
I have to say I was very impressed – I still have VMWare on production machines.
For now…
I tried out Virtual Box during my fiasco with VMWare Server on Ubuntu (Which has since been straightened out. I didn’t like it very much. It was simple enough to use, but when you put it in “full screen” mode, it didn’t really go full screen. Other than that I liked it. It is certainly better than M$ Virtual PC.