Top 3 things to try in VirtualBox 3.1

Here are the top 3 things I personally think VirtualBox 3.1 will be popular for:

Teleportation – a new term coined by VirtualBox team for live migration. This allows you to migrate a live VM environment from one host to another. Traditionally being a feature of only the most advanced server-grade virtualization solutions, live migration is surely a welcome feature in VirtualBox.  For those who haven't tried it yet, live VM means it's up and running and live migration implies your VM keeps functioning and is fully accessible throughout the migration – an obvious improvement from previous "shut down VM on host1, start it up on host2″.

Improved management of VM states on the snapshot level – apparently, you can now restore your VM state from any snapshot and not just the latest one. Starting with VirtualBox 3.1, it is also possible to branch snapshots out – take snapshots of a any given snapshots.

Paravirtualized network adapters (virtio) support – this is a great feature which allows you to use the well-known virtio network adapter by KVM instead of a standard driver software emulating the hardware of a network card. In short, this allows your VMs to use a highly optimized software solution for virtual network cards.

See also:

• VirtualBox on Desktop Virtualization pages
• VirtualBox website
• VirtualBox web console

Sun xVM VirtualBox

Right on time, the next major VirtualBox version is released – VirtualBox 3.0.0!

Major changes in VirtualBox 3.0

The two major improvements in VirtualBox 3.0 can be summed up like this:

• multi-processor VMs - guest SMP with up to 32 virtual CPUs (VT-x and AMD-V only)
• graphics improvements: Direct3D 8/9 (Windows guests only) and OpenGL 2.0 (Windows, Linux and Solaris guests)

Updated functionality in VirtualBox 3.0

There are, as always, quite a few bugfixes and new features. These ones seemed interesting to me, but be sure to check out the full VirtualBox 3.0 changelog:

• VMM: eliminated IO-APIC overhead with 32 bits guests (VT-x only) – looks like there won't be a performance penalty for using IO-APIC anymore
• VRDP: support Windows 7 RDP client
• Linux guests: new daemon vboxadd-service to handle time synchronization and guest property lookup
• USB: Support for high-speed isochronous endpoints (Linux hosts only, will help with webcameras)
• GUI: settings dialog changed – looks much better organized now, and obviously supports all the newly introduced features.

See also:

• VirtualBox
• More articles on Virtual Box
• Changelog for VirtualBox 3.0

Sun xVM VirtualBox

Another update for VirtualBox was released yesterday: VirtualBox 2.2.

OpenGL for Linux and Solaris guests

If you remember, 3D acceleration was introduced for Windows XP guests in VirtualBox 2.1, and now similar functionality had been ported for Linux and Solaris VMs. A quick experiment shows almost 4x performance improvement for 3D between VirtualBox 2.1.2 and VirtualBox 2.2 – I've simply booted Ubuntu live cd and used glxgears to get some idea about the efficiency of new 3D acceleration support.

Host-only networking

Another interesting feature added in 2.2 is the host-only networking. Similarly to a bridged networking, it allows virtual machines exchange network traffic with each other and with the host, but without a need for the real network interface on the host system.

Full support for the OVF

Open Virtualization Format (OVF) is now fully supported, which means you can import OVF systems or export any of your VMs into OVF.

This release brings a few more improvements, so please consult the VirtualBox changelog for all the details.

See also:

• VirtualBox 2.1.2
• VirtualBox changelog
• OVF page @ VMware
• Download VirtualBox
  

Sun xVM VirtualBox

Another major release of Sun xVM VirtualBox, the 2.1.0 version, is now available for download.

From the list of major improvements, I'd like to highlight comment a few.

VirtualBox 2.1.0 major improvements

• Experimental LsiLogic and BusLogic SCSI controllers – a long awaited feature which means VMs from VMware and many more virtualization solutions can now work in VirtualBox even if they had these controllers emulated at the time of initial VM configuration
• Mac OS X users can now enjoy the support for hardware virtualization (VT-x and AMD-V) – to me, this looks like VirtualBox is taking all the right steps to attract more and more users of Mac OS
• It is now possible to run 64-bit guest VMs on 32-bit host operating systems. Only recent CPUs with hardware virtualization support will allow you to give this a try. I'll have to wait a bit myself – my home PC turned out to be so old that it doesn't even support AMD-V.
• Experimental 3D acceleration via OpenGL – so far provided only in a form of a specialized Windows XP/Vista VM driver, this feature hints that there may be similar approach added for Linux and Solaris VMs.
• Intel Nehalem virtualization enhancements support (EPT and VPID) – this means those ones of you who are lucky enough to already own the latest generation of Intel CPUs, the Inte; Core i7 ones, can enjoy even more of a performance advantage
• Full VMDK/VHD support including snapshots – again, snapshots is a common practice in managing VMs these days, so it's great to see it fully supported in VirtualBox

For more details, be sure to visit the official VirtualBox site and read the full VirtualBox 2.1.0 changelog.

My verdict: Just most major VirtualBox updates, this one is a must have for any user looking for a serious desktop virtualization solution.

See also:

• Sun xVM portfolio
• Running VMware Windows VMs in VirtualBox

Sun xVM VirtualBox

Finally, I have the time to confirm one of the releases I've been waiting for: VirtualBox, a desktop virtualization by Sun Microsystems, turned 2.0 last week and you can download VirtualBox 2.0 right now!

Major update: VirtualBox 2.0

Being a major release, VirtualBox 2.0 brings a host of improvements to its already popular platform. I personally find the following most important:

• 64 bits guest support – if you're running a 64-bit host OS, your guests VMs don't have to be limited to 32bit anymore
• Support for AMD-V Nested Pages – this is going to give you a major performance boost if you're lucky enough to be using recent quad-core CPUs from AMD
• Framework for collecting performance and resource usage data (metrics)- VboxManage command now allows setting polling interval and specify data metrics you're interested in for internal performance data collection. Once enabled, such information can be accessed at any time – both host and guest systems are monitored.
• SATA asynchronous IO (NCQ: Native Command Queuing) – another performance win when using raw disk partitions
• Microsoft's VHD disk images support – it seems that VirtualBox is one of the most compatible desktop virtualization solutions now, allowing you to simply use virtual disks created by other systems as oppose to converting them using additional software tools

More on VirtualBox

• Introduction: What Sun VirtualBox Really Is
• VirtualBox 2.0 press release
• Full VirtualBox 2.0 changelog
• Booting your VMware VMs in VirtualBox

Sun Microsystems has just released the maintenance update to VirtualBox product, so xVM VirtualBox 1.6.2 is available for download.

Looks like version 1.6.2 is well worth the upgrade, at least for 64-bit PCs. I'm also happy to see many of Linux and Solaris host-related fixes, the stability of VirtualBox has really improved since version 1.5.

Here's just a few things I like from the VirtualBox changelog:

• VMM: fixed starting of VMs with AMD-V enabled
• VMM: massive performance enhancements for AMD-V
• VMM: stability improvements for AMD-V on Windows hosts
• VMM: correctly detect AMD CPUs with erratum 170 (AMD-V)
• Shared Folders: several fixes (iTunes download, speed up browsing)
• NAT: don't crash if the guest sent a DHCPRELEASE message with an invalid IP address
• NAT: fixed ARP reply for the NAT gateway and for the NAT name server if the guest IP range was changed
• BIOS: allow to change the DMI informatiton (see chapter 9.13, Con'guring the BIOS DMI information, page 125)
• Linux hosts: fixed default runlevel for the kernel module helper script
• Solaris hosts: enabled support for VT-x and AMD-V
• Solaris hosts: dynamic loading of libdlpi fixes a problem where Solaris 10 was not able to start a VM
• Linux additions: fixed runlevels for kernel module helper scripts
• Linux additions: compatibility fixes with Linux 2.6.26
• Linux additions: fixed occasional guest kernel crash during unload of the vboxadd guest kernel module

See also:

• VirtualBox 1.6 – introduction
• Changelog for VirtualBox
• VirtualBox 1.6.2 download

Sun Microsystems has just announced the agreement to acquire innotek, a Germany-based provider of an open source desktop virtualization software called VirtualBox.

Many of you are already familiar with both Sun xVM and VirtualBox, and I agree it does look like these are very similar and competing solutions, but there are a few differences which ensure that xVM and VirtualBox will only compliment each other in your environment:

• Sun xVM Server and VirtualBox are different types of hypervisors: Sun xVM is a bare-metal, kernel-level hypervisor, which runs directly on the hardware. VirtualBox hypervisor is an application that installs on top of an existing OS.

• Sun xVM Server is a datacentre-targeted solution for server virtualization and consolidation. VirtualBox is a lightweight desktop virtualization solution.

• Sun xVM Server suppors VM migration and predictive self-healing .VirtualBox doesn't have these features, but provides rapid deployment capabilities due to its tiny footprint.

See also:

• Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire innotek
• Download VirtualBox
• Sun xVM section on Desktop Virtualization
• innotek acquisition comments from Steve Wilson (Sun Microsystems)

VMmark is the first industry-standard virtualization benchmark – a free product from VMware which allows you to test the performance of your virtual environment by running various workload scenarios on your virtual appliances.

Just like in conventional TPC-based testing, there is a server which runs the workload scenario, and there clients which interact with it triggering different developments of such scenarios.

The following workload scenarios are available in VMmark:

• Mail server
• Java server
• Standby server
• Web server
• Database server
• File server

See also:

• VMmark section on this website
• VMmark product page

Finally, I've got a chance to try the in action. As an experiment, I've installed Windows XP inside a fully virtualized xVM domU on an OpenSolaris build 79 – please click the thumbnail to see a full screenshot.

Surprisingly, Windows XP works rather fast, and 24-bit display accessed through vncviewer is more than enough for the everyday desktop usage like browsing (shown on the screenshot above) or document creation.

A full how-to on installing WinXP inside xVM will be posted shortly on the Solaris blog, but further announcements and highlights of latest Solaris xVM developments will surely follow on the pages of Desktop Virtualization.

See also:

• Solaris xVM

Please visit the section: Sun Microsystems.

See also:

• Solaris xVM
• Desktop and Server Virtualization with Sun xVM