Sun xVM VirtualBox: free x86 virtualiztion
by Volker Weber
TUAW reports:
We first noted the open-source virtualization application VirtualBox way back in 2007, and since then this open-source competitor to VMware Fusion and Parallels has come a long way. Most importantly, perhaps, the project was acquired by Sun Microsystems and has now become Sun xVM VirtualBox with a great deal more support.
Free is good. But xVM does not import VMware machines. And I don't want to do a any Windows install again.
Comments
In previous version of virtualbox it was possible to import vmware VMs into virtualbox. ofcourse you needed to get around all the driver issues as the virtual hardware changed. I did not yet try out the latest sun release yet :-)
You can register the vmware disk-files in virtual box. With this it might be possible to boot the machine, but some problems may occur: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows
I agree that Free is good, but the term is a relative: xVM is free for personal or evaluation use and you get binaries, but the Open Source Edition is a tarball of the source, and not many are going to be able to use that.
I have ran xVN and vertialBx for over a Year now. Works perfectly. Right noe i am running it under Opensuse and works with a raw XP disk.
You can import VM-diskfiles as well.
@Jan-Piet Mens. You can find the compiled open source Edition files in the community or backport repositories of your favorite OS.
Ralf
@Ralf, yes. And if my favorite OS were Windows or Mac OSX ? :-)
I am not impressed by VirtualBox for two reasons:
first: it is still way behind VMWare in several technical aspects.
second: Before aquisition by Sun the conditions for commercial server use was very attractive: €100 per 2 cores. After the aquisition I tried to recheck conditions: I never got an answer on my questions, I tried 2 times ....
I'm running VirtualBox on Ubuntu because VMware doesn't support the new kernel. My previous VMware image imported correctly with one exception: no network connectivity. The virtual adapter VMware installed can't be uninstalled (if you do, it just reinstalls itself), and VirtualBox doesn't create its own. So I created a new machine and mounted the old vmdk as a slave, copied over my old data to the new virtual drive, then wiped the slave.
@Jan-Piet Hm the super easy Mac OS X have no repositories? I can not believe that. Ok i am joking, i know that there are no such thing as repositories on this operating system. But it is really a big advantage of Linux over OS X and Windows to have them. It is very difficult to handle the installation of updates and security fixes for the operating system and all applications without repositories.
Ralf
