I am a big fan of virtualization lately as I have been involved in several development projects and they all need different setup. Instead of loading my system with all these "only use once" or very unwelcome software (e.g. Visual Studio 2008), I installed them into different copies of virtual machines. This allows me to work on clean copies of Windows with only necessary software. Once I finished with them, I simply delete the guest OS image. Very neat.
Until few days ago, I was using VMWare Server as my virtualization platform. Then, I found out VirtualBox from Sun MicroSystem. Now I have been using both of them, I must say for user point of view, there is very little difference between them. What made me move initially was the support of hardware virutlization support, namely Intel VT-x and AMD-V technologies. However, it turns out it does more damages than helping. With VT-x switched on, VirtualBox would crash. It seems the implementation of AMD-V is a bit better. VirtualBox runs perfectly there, but very slow in comparison to VMWare Server I was using. After a quick search on Google, it seems with VirtualBox, enabling hardware support will actual decrease the performance. It is very sad as I really would like to have hardware assisted VM. I don't like the idea of having software emulating function while dedicate hardware supposedly can do it.
Anyway, putting performance issue and buggy VM hardware supports aside, VirtualBox is quite stable and pleasant to use. Especially if you need to run multi guest instances at the same time, it seem to handle better than VMWare Server.
No comments:
Post a Comment