In the early days of vmware it was basically just another way of running some windows apps under Linux (back then Wine wasn’t better at it). Time however proved their gamble right- virtualization became a key aspect of enterprise computing.
Using virtual servers means that one piece of hardware could do many more things, better for the environment, better for the budget and easier to manage.
VMWare ruled this space for a long time because they were first to market, and kept expanding the feature set. Many attempts were made to create a free alternative, all of them sorta worked but until QEMU none of them could really do the job. Even then there were shortcomings and some OS’s just wouldn’t quite work right. Worse than that, QEMU was still just an emulator.
Recently though, I discovered virtualbox, a product SUN had bought over and turned into an enterprise level virtualization suite that doesn’t just match VMWare for features, it exceeds it. A lot of the power of virtualbox as a serious competitor to VMWare comes from it’s use of open standards and protocols to do things.
Now I should add that there are two versions of virtualbox and some of the enterprise features are not available in the FOSS version. But I will mention one of them as a case in point. For the enterprise version, remote access to your VM’s do not require any special clients like VMWare server does, you just use RDP which every OS on the planet already has a client for.
That alone is a major saving as it means that the licensing expense for virtualbox is server-side only.
I haven’t been using the enterprise version though and I do not need it for my needs. I am using virtualbox because I am required to use XP as my main OS on the company laptop, but I cannot live without a KDE4 desktop (on Linux, I know it can run on windows but that wouldn’t give me a Linux OS to work on now would it ?) anymore. Using virtualbox it was easy to install this desktop, the integrated networking covers all the features VMWare offers including host-only, integrated NAT and bridge (although you need to set up bridging yourself it’s not as integrated).
I use the NAT option which works perfectly fine and has the benefit that the many MAC based security policies in my environment cannot tell my VirtualBox linux from my physical windows platform.
Other features include full USB support, a simple GUI interface (something that has been sorely lacking in free virtualization tools so far) and proper multiplatform support (so unlike things like UML and XEN it can run linux on windows or windows on linux).
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KDE4 running inside virtual box – click to view full size
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VirtualBox is also surprisingly fast, I gave mine plenty of ram since it is after all a desktop, but it is fully responsive and runs KDE4.1 much better than my physical machine at home (for which I blame NVidia).
All the basic features you know from VMWare are there, including shared folders (which play oh so nicely with folderview because they just get mounted) and it all works very easily. The only problem I have had in about a week of using it is that the help file doesn’t say how to access shared folders – but a quick google did enlighten me quickly enough:
mount -t vboxfs $SHARENAME $MOUNTPOINT
Or just create an fstab line like this:
$SHARENAME $MOUNTPOINT vboxsf rw,auto,exec 0 0
(Of course $MOUNTPOINT must exist and you should replace $SHARENAME and $MOINTPOINT with real paths).
And here is where it gets interesting. VMWare’s guest tools are… flakey at best and the majority of distro’s I’ve tried to install them on over many years had issues getting them all to work. VirtualBox’s guest additions are powerful, complete and fully functional. They install easily on any distro I’ve tried and work very well.
That is when you start discovering some very cool features, like the pointer integration support, which means merely moving your mouse between your linux and windows desktops and working as if it was just another window. No keyboard locking, nothing. Copy and paste between a VirtualBox and a real machine works fine too.
I am seriously impressed. SUN has taken a solid product here, and turned it into something that is fully enterprise ready and capable. In my own setup, I have a dual monitor configuration, so I typically keep windows open on the one screen and virtualbox running on the other, and switching between them is completely smooth and transparent.
I am impressed and I want to say outright: after many years, there is finally a FOSS product that not only competes with but utterly exceeds the capabilities of VMware for both home and enterprise users. Considdering the hefty pricetag VMWare comes with – I smell trouble ahead for them.
