Recently I've had to find a virtual machine emulator. Given my limited budget (read: zero) I was hunting around for various different pieces of software. Microsoft have their virtual machine software: Virtual PC which is a polished bit of software. It is, however, not up to par with what I want to do. Because I run a host Windows machine and want to use Linux as a guest operating system, VirtualPC has all sorts of issues with it. I tried it and didn't like it. I stumbled upon VirtualBox (www.virtualbox.org) which appears to be sponsored by Sun. Given Sun's previous support of Open Source, I decided to try it.
The installation is very simple and straightforward - it installs extra network adapters, DHCP servers for the internal NAT'd network and a few other bits and pieces. The guest OS support it offers is excellent. In a *very* short amount of time I had a copy of Debian running from the netboot cd, installed and configured an FTP server and I was very happy. My host operating system was Windows Server 2008, which isn't 100% supported but does the job very nicely anyway. I've run it under Windows XP too and it works very well (especially on my Dell D610 Latitude with a 1.6GHz Centrino processor and 2GB of RAM). I'm going to test OpenSolaris on it and see how it goes under the installation.
Some years ago I ran VMWare Desktop to have many virtual machines for testing and other purposes and I found it to be rock solid. The VMWare gear is very good. I have found, to my considerable pleasure, that VirtualBox is as solid and feature filled as VMWare was. It's free status is even better and I love the fact that it supports Linux so beautifully. I'll be experimenting with various other guest OSs in the next few days and I'll let you know my progress as I play with it.
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This is a great, enthusiastic review of VirtualBox! Thanks for sharing your positive experience and recommending it as a free and powerful alternative to other virtualization software.
ReplyDeleteYou've highlighted the common pain points with tools like Virtual PC for Linux guests and perfectly articulated why VirtualBox stands out: its simple installation, excellent guest OS support (especially for Linux like Debian), and its robust, feature-rich performance that you compare favorably to VMware. That rapid setup of a Debian VM with an FTP server speaks volumes about its ease of use.
Your journey to finding a capable, free virtualization solution will resonate with many users facing similar budget constraints or compatibility issues. It's clear your "honeypot playing period" is off to a great start with such a solid foundation!
For more discussions on virtualization, setting up lab environments, or exploring various guest OS performance, a hacking forum is an excellent place to share your progress and experiments.