Virtualbox 3.1.2

VirtualBox is great utility, however, it isn't perfect. One of the annoying problems is its networking. If you are using desktop, it isn't much a problem. However, if you are using laptop, VirtualBox's NAT implementation seems to fail if you switch between networking connectors, which is very common in laptop. For instance, I may move from my WiFi connection to cable connection. This would result lost connection to my Guest System.

With the new version, I can at least regain the connection by change the connection from NAT -> Bridge and back to NAT again as I can dynamically change my connectiont type in the new version. It isn't perfect, but it gets the job done.

I have tried various virtualization solution, and VirtualBox is still my favorite due to its wide range of supported formats, and its speed. While we are talking about speed, the latest version finally fixed the Hardware Virtualization support on my VIA chipset motherboard. Previously, it would caused BSOD, but now, it works perfectly! Hurray!

VirtualBox

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.