With Oracle's rocky reputation around open source, I'm surprised that VirutalBox is still going strong and under active development. There doesn't seem to be any kind of commercial "enterprise version" that they license for big bucks... what is their incentive for keeping this thing going?
It's also made even uglier by the fact that VMware has discontinued Fusion, and Parallels (at least in the Vagrant, etc, ecosystem) has always been a second class citizen).
Not to mention that Parallels licensing is a pain. I understand license key activation as at times a necessary evil but in cases where you are developing a product for use primarily by developers who may frequently re-install their computer, could you at least do some form of trivial hardware checksumming? I had to call support because I'd exceeded five activations of my license. They reset it, after asking why. Several months later, same situation - this time they refused to reset the activation counter. Once loyal customer, no longer, when you refuse to activate software for the purchaser.
Thankfully, Docker et al seem to be making some good strides at making use of Hyve based virtualization in the OS X realm. I'm excited to see how that progresses.
There's some negativity around this product on this thread, but honestly I'm really glad Virtual Box is around and under active development.
I have both an active linux and os x env for dev and I use virtual box to manage and switch between. It's been super useful, very reliable, fast enough, and, btw, it's free.
Do you just have a vanilla OSX VM installation or do you optimize it in some way? For me OSX is very slow on vbox on a very decently spec'ed VM. Far from my experience with Windows guests.
I'm not sure why, but my Ubuntu image with unity always thinks it should run at 10fps. I had to hard set the frame rate in compizConfig at 60 fps to get it to run smoothly.
Putting it here because it took me quite a while to figure out why it was 3D accelerated but still so slow.
Not sure if it is related (could be a Cinnamon problem) but when I run the Cinnamon desktop environment in a VirtualBox VM it says it is using software rendering.
Changing the pointing device from default touch mode to PS/2 mouse in Machine>Settings>System fixed that for me. Seems to be the default for Ubuntu machines in recent versions.
Anyone tested to see if the network and disk IO is actually any faster than before? We found it _very_ slow in the past compared to VMWare Fusion on OSX.
"... better support for Python 3". Why does VB need to better support a specific executable, namely python 3? Anyone have more technical details on this?
VirtualBox supports scripting using python; for that, it provides a python module. Just like any other python library, it needs to specifically support py3 syntax, or errors may happen.
Has anyone done performance tests with different versions of VirtualBox? I often see entries in the changelog relating to "significantly improved performance".
I did a test for VMWare player verses Virtualbox and its no competition, VMWare is hands down a lot faster especially on anything GUI. I like what Virtualbox gives us but the performance is a problem.
I don't see any security-related fixes. Is VBox that solid or am I missing something? I remember also looking at previous versions and not finding much...
"VMM: many more fixes", "GUI: various bugfixes and internal cleanup", "Audio: various bugfixes and infrastructure improvements" - who know what that means. If nobody disclosed it externally as a vulnerability, they could just call things "bugfixes".
My understanding is that on Windows, VirtualBox still can't run along Docker For Windows, because DFW needs Hyper-V and VBox is incompatible. Is this still the case? I don't ask much of my VMs, but desktop Ubuntu guests under Hyper-V are very clunky.
IIRC that is not something that VirtualBox can fix; I read somewhere that Hyper-V requires exclusive use of the virtualisation features of the hardware.
Note that this only applies to 64-bit virtualisation, you can still run Hyper-V and 32-bit VirtualBox virtual machines simultaneously.
[+] [-] StevePerkins|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FireBeyond|9 years ago|reply
Not to mention that Parallels licensing is a pain. I understand license key activation as at times a necessary evil but in cases where you are developing a product for use primarily by developers who may frequently re-install their computer, could you at least do some form of trivial hardware checksumming? I had to call support because I'd exceeded five activations of my license. They reset it, after asking why. Several months later, same situation - this time they refused to reset the activation counter. Once loyal customer, no longer, when you refuse to activate software for the purchaser.
Thankfully, Docker et al seem to be making some good strides at making use of Hyve based virtualization in the OS X realm. I'm excited to see how that progresses.
[+] [-] tobias3|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a3n|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _pmf_|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] berns|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wildpeaks|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] infocollector|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] methehack|9 years ago|reply
I have both an active linux and os x env for dev and I use virtual box to manage and switch between. It's been super useful, very reliable, fast enough, and, btw, it's free.
[+] [-] rpgmaker|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CoolGuySteve|9 years ago|reply
Putting it here because it took me quite a while to figure out why it was 3D accelerated but still so slow.
[+] [-] cptskippy|9 years ago|reply
The funny thing is that VB complains about this configuration whenever you load the console.
Have you tried increasing the video memory for the VM or enabling acceleration?
[+] [-] Siecje|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbr13|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctrlrsf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zouhair|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrmondo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelvin0|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ygra|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vetinari|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] christogreeff|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulKeeble|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrmondo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blub|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viraptor|9 years ago|reply
But it's not like they don't get any security issues at all: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=virtualbox
[+] [-] mkesper|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jare|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ianvdl|9 years ago|reply
Note that this only applies to 64-bit virtualisation, you can still run Hyper-V and 32-bit VirtualBox virtual machines simultaneously.
[+] [-] Can_Not|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilaksh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxkleberson|9 years ago|reply
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