VirtualBox 3.0 Rocks

July 14th, 2009

With much pain I managed to convince a Vmware WinXP virtual machine to run in VirtualBox. At first it ran very sluggishly(>3 hours to do a build?), but after I turned off IO Apic stuff in Windows, it’s become disturbingly fast. It now takes 40minutes to build a wince fennec vs almost 80minutes it took on VMware server.

VirtualBox’s disk throughput is phenomenal, in fact, this is the first time I’ve seen almost-native speed disk io in virtual machine. A benchmark I tried reported 45mb/s 4K read/writes (these were cached on the linux side).

Unlike Vmware server, VirtualBox’s usb works without troubles, shared folders were easy to setup etc. It’s an awesome app, hope Sun/Oracle keeps it up.

Posted by tglek Filed in Uncategorized
4 Comments »

4 Responses to “VirtualBox 3.0 Rocks”

  1. Steven Says:
    July 14th, 2009 at 2:31 pm

    I had a similarly experience switching to VirtualBox from VMWare. Hard to get it switch over, but really nice once I did. The open source aspect is appealing, too, though I haven’t gone in and fixed any bugs myself :-) .

  2. Alexander Limi Says:
    July 14th, 2009 at 4:49 pm

    Just adding to the choir here. Windows 7 RC and VirtualBox 3 makes for a great (and free, for now) testing platform. :)

  3. Ted Mielczarek Says:
    July 14th, 2009 at 5:20 pm

    Did you use the free version or did you pay for it? I’ve just been using the version in ubuntu.

  4. LpSolit Says:
    July 15th, 2009 at 1:51 am

    @Tara: I hope you are using VBox 3.0.2 because 3.0.0 is very buggy.

    @Ted: you should use the one on the VirtualBox website, which contains more features (e.g. USB support) than the one embedded with your Linux distro. It’s free, no need to pay anything.

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