I've just finished comparing virtualbox and vmware, and not of my own volition. I needed to compare a bunch of different file system solutions for clustering (see post elsewhere) and after working with vmware for several days finally gave up (vmware server 2.0), and tried the same under virtualbox. Virtualbox did the job quietly without fuss or license keys, where vmware was nothing but a pita and eventually refused to work.

The host os on the test machine is Ubuntu, the guest of was CentOs 4.7.

I can confirm this, had a similar experience. Though the VMWare Player is a nice piece of easy software for people who don't need all the features.

On a side note, did you ever install MS Windows iso with a system running on a CPU with SSE3 extension? Wuuuahhh thats fast :)

This is why I'm happy that MS might be distributing Win7 on USB drives - install will finally take a reasonable amount of time.

Since this thread is becoming a VMWare hate session I'll add my gripes:

-No native VMWare infrastructure client for Linux (or OSX) -Very limited hardware support for ESX -Stupid restrictions on the free version of ESX to up-sell. (ie, no jumbo frames on iSCSI?)

It's no surprise to me VMWare has completely squandered their lead in virtualization. The actual end user experience of VMWare products has gone steadily down while the free/OSS and commercial competition has raised the bar. I don't have any major problems with VMWare's products from a technical standpoint but I'm seeing less reason to use them and deal with a lot of arbitrary marketing/licensing restrictions that just ends up making my life harder.

ESX isn't really comparable to VirtualBox, and is quite different to the other VMware products, so this isn't a particularly appropriate place to talk about it. But I must say that making a product like ESX have a free version as powerful as it is, is simply amazing and I am grateful for it.

Have you (or anyone) compared VirtualBox to a desktop virtualization package, such as VMware Fusion? How does it stack up?

I have used VMWare Fusion for a couple of years now and have no complaints whatsoever. It's stable and not noticeably slower than using Boot Camp. USB pass-through and networking just work. You can even launch a Windows program directly from Finder. My one gripe--slow access times for the host-client file sharing interface--was fixed with 2.0.

I have never used any other VMWare product, or Virtual Box, but I thought I would add my $.02 since my experience seems to differ from most others here.

I've only used it for servers.

It's important if you install windows in a VM to install the "guest tools" with Virtual box.. it makes it 100x more responsive. Don't forget this step.

This is true even if the guest OS is something other than Windows. Automatic mouse capture is a very convenient.

New features include guest SMP support, OpenGL 2.0, and experimental Direct3D 8/9 support (for windows guests, obviously...)

Warning: Guest SMP only works if you have a cpu with Intel VT-x or AMD-V.

Damn, why did I buy a Pentium Dual-Core instead of a regular Core 2 Duo? :/

I love VirtualBox so much. Thanks to Innotek for the free and open-source distribution. I do use the closed source version though.

If only they would support branching snapshopts. For example a main VM and then you could have one work tree and one webbrowsing tree. This would make using it for daily work even more appealing. Well, some day, I am sure.

I'd like to echo your wish. I also would like to have that feature.

I'd like to use when I am debugging a configuration issue on the OS with a certain application. Not a show-stopper by any means, but a would like to have.

At the moment, the page's "MD5 sum" link is not resolving.

http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/3.0.0/MD5SUMS

hope it means this bug is fixed now....

http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/2978

i tested it on my computer, it didn't seem to occur, yay!

3.0 Already? Wasn't just sometime ago 2.3 the newest?

While VirtualBox is really great I like OSE (OpenSourceEdition) better. Unfortunately if one needs e.g. usbhotplug then you have to use the commercial branch :/

Does anyone know when OSE will have that feature?

Probably when the developers are so rich they don't need money for food or rent.

Not to mention that there's nothing preventing a 3rd party from developing an open source patch implementing support for this very feature.

Sure there is: lack of expertise. Also, unfamiliarity with the code base. For people without programming experience, there's also the opportunity cost of learning a programming language.

The reason open source hasn't taken off with the general public is b/c every time a non-programmer suggests a genuinely useful feature (to non-programmers), the response is: "it's open source, program it yourself." Most often, the easier and cheaper path is to just buy the competing commercial program.

I'm not really sure what your point is here…the feature is _already_ available in closed-source form. I was merely pointing out that its presence and that of an open source implementation are not mutually exclusive simply because the closed source version was developed by the same people who developed and released the source for the rest of VirtualBox.

Wont they be working at Oracle soon?

Maybe. Or maybe Oracle will stick with its own Xen-derived OracleVM.

And you think that uncle Larry will make them rich?

Did anyone get this to work on OSX? I installed it on my MBP, put Ubuntu 9.04 and it always locks up within a few minutes after booting, usually while its running the updater. Just wondered if others see this or its just me.

I didn't know other HNers were such VirtualBox fans! I use it daily and love it. This release looks great.

but how is it for mac uses? it seems not as nice compared to parallels?

It's fine. I use it to run Solaris 10 and Windows XP on my MBP.

I ran VirtualBox on my MPB for nearly a year. It was a fantastic platform to run XP under for web development testing. It works very seamlessly.

Works pretty well on 10.5.7 with WinXP SP3 as guest.

I couldn't install a firewall for testing (Comodo CIS, it'll hang WinXP on reboot) on the guest w/o VT-X/AMD-V off. I hope they fixed it in this new version.

Excuse a newbie... is it worth trying Ubuntu on Mac with VirtualBox? What should I know?

(-: Please don't flame me. I might like ports as much as apt, if I knew it better. :-)

VirtualBox on the Mac is very nice. A respectably small download, an easy install, a pleasant GUI, it feels very polished and in my light use, both featureful and stable.

Yes, try it.

Does anyone have any experience with how VirtualBox performance compares with VMWare?

There is a review here http://www.infoworld.com/d/virtualization/virtualization-sho...

Basically they are all pretty similar, if you use it in a serious environment there are probably more tools and consultants that will tune Vmware server for you, but for ordinary use it's probably a wash.

I recently made the change from Macports to Ubuntu on VirtualBox. Things are much nicer now. My one tip would be to have any datafiles separate (ie not read/write files on the Mac filesystem directly - even though you can) and communicate between the two "machines" using version control.

I think this is the way to go for everyone newbie or not. If you're not going to be deploying on OS X then why develop under it. VirtualBox with your deployment system on Mac OS X gives you the best of all possible worlds.

I work on Linux, Mac is a hobby.

It is a bit of a failure to go the virtual way, but I have too little background on (modern) bsd stuff.