Open source tool has its limitations, promise
Oracle/Sun’s Virtual Box is a free/open source project and can be easily downloaded and installed. It has no real commercial support yet, but Sun intends to develop support components for those who want them.
Virtual Box has some limitations, but we found it’s also evolving rapidly through repeated feature updates and has reasonably good project resources for those who don’t mind support via community and resource channels. Many functions in Virtual Box aren’t enabled through the slick dialog boxes of Fusion and Parallels Desktop — they’re manual, and it’s therefore not recommended for the faint of heart.
Once installed, we found we could use other saved virtual machine (VM) formats easily. We tested use of .vhd files or .vmdk files directly and found there is no need to import them first — they can be used directly for loadable VM guest instances under Virtual Box. Loading and running these VMs was simple.
Hardware support is a bit flaky with USB devices under Virtual Box, as we tried installing iSight drivers from BootCamp in order to use the built-in iSight. It worked but it also made the CPU usage significantly increase. USB detection of media was iffy on the flash drives we used, and we found that VirtualBox was unable to give information to Ubuntu regarding the flash drive file system format that was available to guest VMs under Parallels or VMware Fusion.
One feature we really liked was the ability to run VirtualBox VMs without starting up the GUI. Using command-line tools and services, we were able to connect via Remote Desktop. This worked really well and all operating systems are supported (RDP does not need to be enabled inside the VM). This is a great feature that the other two competitors do not have. Headless operation proved especially useful on a server such as an Xserve, if we would have wanted to run some server VMs.
Like its competitors, we used shared folders under both Linux and Windows. To access them in Linux, we had to mount them manually using ‘mount –t vboxsf share_name mount_point’. In Windows, this share is located at VBOXSRVShareName, although it didn’t work if we typed it directly. Strangely enough it works by browsing and displaying the exact share point we typed above. But dragging and dropping between the VM and Finder does not work at this time. Mounting other shares could also be obtuse, although automated subsequently by user-made scripts.
Virtual Box also has a similar feature to Parallels Coherence and Fusion’s Unity for Windows called Seamless Mode, but there was no application sharing available as found in Fusion and Parallels. Seamless Mode works similarly to the aforementioned features by hiding the Windows desktop and showing the Windows start menu and taskbar, but there are some notable differences.
This mode is most similar to Parallels in that it leaves the Windows start menu at the bottom of the screen by default, but it does not play well with Apple MacOS 10.5 Spaces application. Trying to drag and drop between Spaces takes everything with it. As an example, we had Internet Explorer and a Command Prompt open, we tried moving IE to another space, and everything came along for the ride. All windows are connected together, and so discrete application use under MacOS of Windows applications isn’t possible. VirtualBox doesn’t show applications in the Mac OS X Dock like Parallels or Fusion does, either. This mode has potential, but falls behind its competition.
During our testing, we had miscellaneous networking failures/outages. VirtualBox seemed to randomly disable the wireless card on the Mac side, but when using the Mac’s wired Ethernet, there didn’t seem to be any problem.
VirtualBox is free, but there’s a cost in terms of integrating it on the Mac. Its performance is reasonably good, and there are acceleration settings available for ACPI, 3-D acceleration, and the use of 64-bit CPU virtualization modes (VT/T-type CPUs only).
VirtualBox is not as sophisticated as the other hypervisors, but it holds promise.
