Virtual Box

21 Jul 2008 . . Comments

#virtual box #vmware

On several of the projects I work on, it’s very handy to have multiple operating systems installed to test out my code. For a while I’ve been using VMWare. It’s been working pretty nicely and I didn’t have many complaints. I did experience some headaches when I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 because of the kernel packages, but after a couple of bug fixes, recompiling, and reconfiguring, everything was happy.

I’ve got a Mac Pro on the desk next to me that we’ve been running Parallels on to run some of our Windows-only software (e.g. the client for our library catalog). Phil saw that there was support for Windows on OS X 10.5, so we threw Virtual Box on it to try it out. Here are my observations thus far running the software on Ubuntu and Leopard:

1. Virtual Box seems to be a bit faster. I have no tests to back this up, it just seems faster.
2. The VDIs are nice (here's a longer list of VDIs)
3. Permissions for the kernel driver can cause a small headache (be sure to add your user account to the vboxusers group).
4. Virtual Box doesn't require me to go get keys when I rebuild a computer and forget to write down the key :)

So far, I really am liking Virtual Box…