vm

[Preston Hagar]

On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 9:52 AM, Verde Denim <tdldev at gmail.com> wrote:
> I setup my personal Ubuntu box with 8.04 and would like to test some tools
> in virtual environments.
> Classically, vmware has been the choice for this, but I've been reading
> about VirtualPC and another app (I think it's called xen).
> I wanted to see if others on the list had a preference of one over another.
> If the consensus isn't vmware, it should probably be able to read or convert
> vmware environments, since a few at work that I'd like to test with are in
> vmware form.
>

I was a long time vmware user and recently switched to VirtualBox
(www.virtualbox.org) and would never go back.  In my experience,
VirtualBox does a much better job of resource management (I can run
more VMs with less strain on the host machine) as well as provides USB
support.  It also has integrated RDP support for my Windows vms which
is nice.

The other nice thing that made the conversion easy is that VirtualBox
can natively read VMWare vmdk files, so you can just setup you
existing VMWare vms in VirtualBox and not have to re-install them.
Installation is easy, I use the free, but not completely open source
version.  Just go here:

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

and click on the link for Ubuntu 8.04 (i386 or AMD64 whichever you
run) and install the deb file.

About the only issue I have found is that when I do a kernel upgrade,
I usually have to reinstall the deb file so it can rebuild kernel
modules for the new kernel.  Other than that I have not had any
issues.

Hope this helps.

Preston