Nifty bit of sofware: Oracle VirtualBox

Upgrading my computer at the end of December was a perfect time to start fresh with all my installs.  The first couple days were the usual whirlwind of installs for all the most used pieces of software (OS obviously, browsers, IDE, Skype, and so on).  Unfortunately I'm far from the most organized guy around so a lot of the things I used to have, but didn't immediately need, slipped my mind.  A couple days ago though I ran into the need for a virtual machine and realized I hadn't re-installed Windows Virtual PC yet.

In 2011 I used Virtual PC on and off as a platform for testing projects in a few browser/OS configurations that are common to our clients but that I don't personally use at home.  It's worked well, but as impatient as I am I always found it taking too long to start up and shut down VMs (not the guest OS itself, but rather the loading time before the guest started 'booting').  Since I was faced with a fresh installed anyway I looked around for some alternatives.  One of the first things that popped up on my Google search was Oracle's VirtualBox software.  Between it free price tag, the well-known Oracle as its developer and the fact that it's open source software I decided it's worth a shot.

Installation (I use Win 7 x64 as the host) went smoothly.  Configuration was also very straightforward and covered all the usual things I've come to expect from a desktop VM solution.  The list of supported guest OSs (as far as I can see from the options when setting up a VM) is quite extensive.  The Windows selection covers everything from 3.1 to 8.  The Linux list covers big names like Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora, Gentoo, Debian and several others.  The other lists are more limited, but some names stand out: DOS, Max OS X (and its Server pair), Solaris 10, Free BSD (and a handful of other flavors), several OS/2 versions and more.  Each list also tends to have an Other option which may let you install even things unlisted.  Also, most OSs are accompanied by their 64-bit counterpart as well.

My first attempt was to import my Windows XP virtual disk I had from my previous Virtual PC install and basically re-build my WinXP VM.  This didn't pan-out as neither the built-in Virtual Media Manager nor several command line tricks I found on Google were able to turn this virtual disk into something usable.  This wasn't a huge issue as I had pretty much expected to start fresh when I chose to try different VM software.

Windows 7 and Ubuntu VMs in Oracle Virtual Box

Starting from scratch I created two VMs, one with Ubuntu 11.10 and one with Windows 7, both in 64 bit version.  Both of them installed very smoothly.  Absolutely no problems with Windows 7, and while Ubuntu threw a couple error lines due to some feature the virtual bios didn't support it installed and runs perfectly.

One thing I really liked is that once the guest OSes were up and running everything else was also working without any additional drivers or tweaking.  Both VMs' sound system played properly through the host's speakers, both of them were connected to the internet and picked up the USB devices I enabled on them.  A very quick "Install Guest Additions..." on each VM also provided them with video drivers (after a reboot of the guest OS) that allowed them to go beyond 1024x768.

What I really like (beyond the painless setup of the VMs) is that start-up / shutdown or save / restore of the VM state is very very quick compared to Virtual PC.  No, I didn't run benchmarks on all that, but it definitely satisfies my impatience.

All-in-all Oracle's VirtualBox addresses my VM needs so I can see myself using it long term.  If you're looking for a VM solution then this one is definitely worth a look-see.