Andrew's ramblings

VMWare Alternative VirtualBox

Tags: Virtualisation

VirtualBox has been around for awhile now, but the thing that attracted me to this was the fact that it is a professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software. I was a huge fan of VMWare but the cost was not something that as a developer wanting something for personal use, I could justify spending a great deal of money on. Don't get me wrong with that, I still believe that if it is worth the money it is well and truely worth the money. Just sometimes there are so many products that we use in our day to day jobs or development in our personal time, that I personally find it hard to justify the amount of money needed to just keep up with.

Anyway having said that, VirtualBox is a fairly nice little application that has now met my needs. One of the first things that struck me about VirtualBox was the Disk manager feature, under VMWare (Well at least the last version I used anyway Workstation) if you wanted to add a hard disk to the virtual machine you had to go searching for it.

How does that become important to me, well lets look at it this way it is not a huge deal to use but can be over time. One of the things that I have is a fair amount of Virtual Servers and machines that I use to do my testing with. And every know and then locating them can be a pain in the rear end.

VirtualBox has seemed to take this one step further, how is that important to me and maybe you. Well by adding the disks to the Virtual Media Manager, it allows me to have a smorgasboard of disks that I can use. The most common example is that I have a complete fresh install of ubuntu, that I use to setup my machines with. And then have what I will classify as data disks, these disks usually as the name implies holds the data that I need or want.

If take this a step further from that, I have one Virtual Machine that is a subversion server that I use to place all my source code into. But the disk is a separate entity to the actual server image for transportability.

Now there are a few things that could be added to the Virtual Media Manager to make things a lot easier, so that I don't have to manually do things. But the ease of just knowing that I can add it quickly if need be is a huge bonus, that I find very handy to have.

So far I have found it extremely fast, and easy to use without any problems. Except the odd user error, where I tried to load a 64bit virtual server into a 32bit Virtual Machine.

Anyway I have found that in time it might get some of the other features that I loved in VMWare Workstation, but until then I can live without them knowing that I am now reducing my personal expenditure when it comes to development in my spare time.

I will encourage you to have a look and judge for yourself, the link to check this out is VirtualBox website and I am sure that like myself you will come to enjoy it as much as I am.
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