On Tue, Aug 03, 2010 at 09:25:57AM -0400, Whit Blauvelt wrote:
On Tue, Aug 03, 2010 at 09:10:39AM -0400, Scott Robbins wrote:
There is also the lighter, and at this point, probably less feature-ful VirtualBox, of course.
VirtualBox works ... until it doesn't. Quality control, in my experience (it would really take a survey of hundreds of users to be sure, since everything has bugs _someone_ will encounter), has slipped considerably under Oracle management.
Can't speak to the relative feature-fulness of VB. Might depend on whether you count simplicity as a feature. It is pretty darn simple. So for someone needing a simple answer....
Yes, exactly--that's its main benefit I think. For casual testing, for things like running a client to quickly test ldap, that sort of thing, I find it quite handy.
I haven't done any benchmarks in a long time, save for an almost useless one, compiling FreeBSD make buildworld--VBox was about an hour slower than VMware-player, and KVM-qemu was faster by about 10 minutes--that is, faster than VMware.
So, my REALLY subjective impression is that KVM-qemu (on a supported CPU) is somewhat faster than VMWare-player--the new one--which is faster than VirtualBox. VMware-player and VirtualBox are probably about equal in ease of use, VBox is smaller, possibly a bit faster to set up.
Going to re-title this one post as it had nothing to do with the OP's question.