Desktop Virtualization

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What Are Your Thoughts On VirtualBox 5.0?

I've been using Parallels for quite some time now but just realised that I never gave VirtualBox 5.0 a proper test run.

VirtualBox 5.0 features

From the official release notes it seems there's lots of useful stuff:

  • Better Windows and Linux VM performance thanks for para-virtualization
  • Improved CPU utilisation – larger set of CPU instructions is now visible to each guest VM so you may see improvements if using recent enough software
  • USB 3.0 support – have to try this with one of my external HDDs
  • Disk image encryption – could be a useful alternative to built-in encryption of OS filesystems

Recent improvements in VirtualBox 5.0

And from the most recent VirtualBox 5.0 release (5.0.14), there seems ot be a few OSX related improvements:

  • fixed audio capture on OSX
  • proper limiting of vCPUs (not very relevant on my dual core laptop, I think)
  • several El Capitan related bugfixes

What do you think of VirtualBox 5.0?

So the questions are:

  1. What are your thougths on VirtualBox 5.0?
  2. Are you still using VirtualBox?
  3. Is primary use still desktop or are you looking at Docker containers or anything else server related?

Thanks for taking the time to comment, feel free to let me know on Twitter as well (@glebreys)

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VirtualBox 3.1

Just getting around to have a look at VirtualBox 3.1, which is yet another major update to the great free desktop virtualization from Sun Microsystems.

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.

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VirtualBox 3.0 Released!

Sun xVM VirtualBox

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)

[Read more…]

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VirtualBox 2.2: OpenGL for Linux and Solaris guests

Sun xVM VirtualBox

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. [Read more…]

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Boot your VMware Windows VMs in VirtualBox

I'm pretty sure I have mentioned it in one of the VirtualBox announcement posts: if you have an existing VMware VM disk image with your OS installed in it, you don't even have to convert it when you switch to Sun xVM VirtualBox.

Booting VMware VMs with Windows hangs in VirtualBox

VirtualBox natively supports VMware VMDKs, but so far I was unable to boot any of the Windows XP VMware VMs in VirtualBox – only a few seconds after being turned on, the VM will seemingly hang even though I/O icon in the statusbar of it will indicate some traffic.

Turns out, it's a well known problem, and there's a very simple solution to it explained on the Migrate existing Windows installations to VirtualBox page of the Virtualbox wiki.

Advanced VirtualBox settings: IO APIC

Basically, pre-installed Windows images fail to boot up in VirtualBox because of the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) problems.

There are a few versions of HAL supplied with each Windows:

  • Standard HAL
  • ACPI HAL
  • ACPI HAL with IO APIC support

They are supplied in a form of 3 different DLLs, and only one is picked based on your hardware configuration at the time of a Windows install. Because VMware supports IO APIC in VMs by default, that defines the HAL version used in your Windows VM.

VirtualBox is a bit smarter: IO APIC is disabled by default due to expensive (CPU-wise) virtualization. That's why, by default, your newly created VirtualBox VM will not boot a VMware image with Windows pre-installed.

Still, the IO APIC option is here, so you can just enable it for your VirtualBox VM to make the Windows image work.

This screenshot (click the thumbnail to see it in full resolution) shows what you need to do.

VirtualBox IO-APIC Settings

That's it – this trick has really helped me, and I sure hope it helps you. Stay tuned for more VirtualBox tips!

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Just released: Sun xVM VirtualBox 1.6.2

Virtual Box

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.

[Read more…]

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