Comments on: 5 Reasons Why You Should Use VirtualBox Over VMware Server

By: Iveen Duarte (iveen) 's status on Monday, 16-Nov-09 01:13:42 UTC - Identi.ca

Iveen Duarte (iveen) 's status on Monday, 16-Nov-09 01:13:42 UTC - Identi.ca — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 01:13:46 +0000

[...] http://maketecheasier.com/5-reasons-why-you-should-use-virtualbox-over-vmware-server/2008/07/21 a few seconds ago from Gwibber [...]

By: Bogdan Dumitru

Bogdan Dumitru — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:52:12 +0000

VMWare Server 2.0 is a beautifully engineered virtual rack for servers. it does what is intended to do seamless and smooth. VBox has a completely different target.

The way i found that VM Server 2.0 works best is installing a minimal host OS that uses minimum CPU/Ram but has SCSI emulation for drives (very important)
Next, feel confortable to use SCSI PASSTHROUGH instead of virtual USB on guests for any USB/SATA/SAS/IDE even drives connected to the host. the speed difference is incredible.

from my test host machine i can type these in:
HOST HW: Pentium 4 HT @ 2.8 (Dell GX280)
Host OS: generic linux kernel 2.6.24
w/ VMWare server 2.0 built from sources
USB Drive – Lacie 1TB ( 35 MB/s read speed on normal environment )
in a BSD client, with USB passthrough i got 8-10 MB/s speed (RAW) and 28-31 MB/s by SCSI Passthrough.
The explanation is simple. With USB passthrough you already use SCSI emulation and on top of that USB …

Cheers.

By: Vivek

Vivek — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 10:52:57 +0000

Your 5 reasons, are somewhat mine too I love it for it’s speed and ease of use while I downloaded a 400MB VMware server app only to find out it runs inside a browser and has also the worst speed ( it took ages to just see the login screen of ubuntu )!!

By: Heril

Heril — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:53:02 +0000

One important thing to consider is the intended purpose and target audience of the compared software. VirtualBox is more of a generalized virtualization solution, while VMware has some very specific product solutions. To say that VBox is better than VMware server because it has seamless mode and VMW server doesn’t have unity, because unity goes against the intended purpose of the software. Its meant to run server VMs, almost like the host is a rack mount and the VMs running on VMware server are the rack servers, machines that you don’t see most of the time are meant for limited direct access and more often remote access.

And that’s one of the tings I really like about VMware Server is that design, because that’s what I use that product for. I also like how the VMware teams are for VMware workstation.

Those are two key features for my need for virtual machines, so I use vmware.

By: Dissidente

Dissidente — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 23:25:34 +0000

I’m a long time user of VMWare technologies, ever since they came arround. As a sysadmin I frequently use VMWare for SO testing and infraestructure lab managing, and in my company we have 3/4 of our server virtualized on ESX.

I’m using OS X for a couple of weeks now (researching better integration of OS X in our Windows domain for our designers), and decided to go for VirtualBox instead of the VMWare product for OS X (which is paid!).

VirtualBox is very lightweight, and I agree that it seems to be quicker than VMWare Server (even dough this is a dubious comparion – OS X VirtualBox vs Windows 2003 (x86)/2008 (x64) VMWare Server.

One negative thing i’ve notice dough, is that networking still need to go a long way from VMWare. The speeds are lower than I expected, and the configuration seems a bit quirkier than VMWare.

I miss VMWare’s resource swapping, that is really usefull while running labs of 2 and 3 VM’s at the same time in “normal” desktop hardware. I think that VirtualBox doesn’t do it, but I’m yet to test it under a serious load.

Given some 2008 x64 issues with VMWare, I’ll try to install VirtualBox with some tweaks in my box and see how it goes =)

Cheers

By: s1m0n

s1m0n — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 10:24:36 +0000

Until they implement drag and drop between host and guest, no VirtualBox switchover for me. Dealbreaker!

By: Justin Spradlin

Justin Spradlin — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 03:19:18 +0000

VirtualBox is incredible. Thanks for your great write up. I also have a take on why VirtualBox is great. If anyone is interested I have posted my thoughts at http://www.fiascode.com/general-technology/5-reasons-virtualbox-rocks-my-socks/

By: Malcolm Bastien

Malcolm Bastien — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 15:25:50 +0000

Nice article. I still haven’t tried any virtualization at all on my Ubuntu system, but I think VirtualBox looks like the way to go if I’m running Gnome and want a test system to run, say, the latest versions of KDE.

By: Hugh

Hugh — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 13:30:57 +0000

Seconded Colin’s comments re. remote access of virtual clients. Also, I tried Virtualbox first and liked it but setting up bridged networking was a pain in the arse compared to VMware server, where it was a no-brainer.

By: Colin

Colin — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:35:15 +0000

I agree that for personnal use Virtual Box is fantastic. However it is not at all suited to being run as a service for remote access of virtual machines. While it is possible it took me a few days to get going, and is basically a hideous hack.

VirtualBox also lacks multiple CPU and 64bit guest capabilities, but if you don’t need that then I’d say go with it. It’s much more user friendly.

By: Free Biao » Blog Archive » Ubuntu: nm-applet keyring; installing VMWare Server 2.0 on Ubuntu 8.10; VMWare networking; VirtualBox

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 11:01:30 +0000

[...] 5 Reasons Why You Should Use VirtualBox Over VMware Server The real advantage of VirtualBox over VMware server lies in its performance. VirtualBox apparently runs faster than VMware server. A timed experiment of an installation of Windows XP as the guest OS took 20 mins in VirtualBox and 35 mins on VMware server. A similar test on the booting time of the guest OS also shows favor to VirtualBox with a timing of 45secs compared to 1min 39 secs on VMware server. [...]

By: Russell Lewis

Russell Lewis — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 05:55:19 +0000

Amen to the post. I just installed virtualbox on my ubuntu x64 server and it is a lot smoother install and set-up than vmware server.

By: Kai

Kai — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 07:22:00 +0000

The only thing that’s against virtualbox is that it doesn’t support DHCP. I know it can be made to work, but it’s a lot of work.

By: Toly

Toly — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:25:11 +0000

Hey Damien,

Thanks for the comparison! Very useful. I was thinking to upgrade to Intrepid in October – will definitely try Virtual Box..

For now VmWare Sever will do, although it is pretty slow to use it as a desktop..

Thx,

– Toly

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:50:59 +0000

I totally agree I’ve switched from VMware Player to VirtualBox on my desktop for virtualization. And I can’t find a reason to go back to VMware Player. I really love it. Also I agree on the five pros you mentioned. There is only one small thing from VMware I’m missing though is the ability to drag and drop a file from the host to the guest and have it copied.

Great post Damien thanks.

By: rrdharan

rrdharan — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:17:27 +0000

A more appropriate comparison would be between VirtualBox and VMware Player, which is also free and much more similar in terms of architecture and intended use case.

By: avarus

avarus — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 07:07:07 +0000

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/113938?tstart=15

By: Damien

Damien — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 03:15:23 +0000

@reptileqc: It was not included in the Hardy repository.

By: reptileqc

reptileqc — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 03:07:34 +0000

Regarding the installation of VMWare on Linux, I’m not sure I understand what you are trying to say.

In Synaptic, you can simply install VMWare Server by clicking on the vmware-server package and then clicking apply.

It does it in Ubuntu 7.04 at least and probably newer versions too.

By: Damien

Damien — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:04:21 +0000

Well, every software sure got its pros and cons. Hopefully VirtualBox can clear up its networking issue in the next update. Despite that, I still find that VirtualBox is more user-friendly and much easier to use.

@avarus: I have tried Vmware workstation, it crashes my system every now and then and I don’t really have a good impression of it. I have to reinstall back VMware Server just to get my VM running stably.