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I decided to do a little comparing and contrasting between VMWare
and Virtualbox. VirtualBox and VMWare
are both virtualization programs that
allow a “host” operating system to run a “guest” operating system on “virtual”
hardware. There are many different paradigms on how to virtualize hardware. The most fundamental way is to actually
emulate hardware, but this makes the guest operating system incredibly slow and
it is uses a lot of system resources on the host operating system. Another way
is for the virtual host to provide a virtual hardware layer for the guest
operating system then, interpret and pass the commands to the host operating
system. This way, the host is not actually emulating a hardware clock, system
bus, or peripherals. Supposedly, this method is not platform independent as the
host OS relies on specific hardware such as an x86 platform , but the x86
platform is virtually ubiquitous to computing, so this is rarely if ever a
problem
Here is my Host (Linux) running a guest OS (Windows):
WMware and VirtualBox use the second paradigm discussed.
They therefore are very similar in performance, setup and otherwise. I tested
both of them on a couple of points to see which was advantages. Here’s what I
came up with.
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Category
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VMWare
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VirtualBox
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Winner
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Download
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From WMWare’s site, about 40 MB’s
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From Sun Microsystems, about 23 MB
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VirtualBox
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Source
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Proprietary (Closed) source
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Both Proprietary Version and Open Source Version
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VirtualBox
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Speed
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Great Speed
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Great Speed
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Tie
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Installation
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Easy in Windows…Little trickier in Linux.
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Easy for Linux and Windows
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VirtualBox
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License
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Arg! Free, but somewhat tricky to obtain a license. The website
was not really clear on how to do this.
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Free Open Source Edition (OSE) and does not require any
sort of registration.
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VirtualBox
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Bulk
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Heavy System Requirements, Installs many virtual hardware
drivers in Windows
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Uses Kernel Module in Linux, has helper daemons to provide
network communications. Installs
virtual hardware in Windows and Linux if the user wants to do bridging
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VirtualBox
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Interface
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Easy to Use
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Easy to Use
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Tie
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OS Support
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Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, DOS, etc. No major problems
installing or otherwise running OS’s. I used it to test some Linux firewalls,
and it seemed a little slow on those.
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Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, DOS. Windows XP upgraded to
SP3 BSOD’ed, however a clean install with SP3 worked fine.
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Supposedly, VirtualBox is suppose to have broader support
for operating systems. But for all practical purposes, they are about the
same. I’d say it’s a tie.
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Uninstall
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Easy in Windows and Linux
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Easy in Windows and Linux
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Tie
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VirtualBox seems to be the better of the two, but the
advantages of VirtualBox have nothing to do with functionality or performance.
Pound for pound, these two products are about the same. They implement the same
virtualization paradigm have a very similar interface, and both work surprisingly
well on a number of platforms.
I was a strong proponent of VMWare
until I took VirtualBox
for a spin. But I primarily use virtualization for testing, and nothing more. I
pretty much set up a test bed, use it for a while, then blow it away after
testing. If one already has production virtual
hosts on one or the other, it would be difficult to port the hosts to another
system. I suppose, if anything, be consistent on which ever you use.
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