The Firefox of Virtualization? Sun's xVM VirtualBox 1.6.2

In many ways, the product is comparable to the browser: it's available under a general public license, delivered with an API set for customization and is cross-platform. With 5 million downloads, VirtualBox is not going unnoticed.

The product is unique in the fact that it is not dependent on virtualization-capable processors. In fact, the vendor clams that their software-based virtualization can offer faster performance under certain workloads, particularly when compared to Intel VT-x multiprocessor architecture.

The vendor gives the reason that the CPU has to repopulate the cache which takes more of a toll on processing performance.

The Test Center conducted a benchmark test involving an HP Proliant server with an Intel Xeon CPU 3050 2.12 GHz processor. The server has 2 GB of physical memory. A Vista virtual machine was created in VirtualBox.

Reviewers first disabled VTI in BIOS. Then, the VM was checked to make sure that VT-x/AMD-v support was not enabled within VirtualBox. Primate Labs' Geekbench 2 benchmark software was used as a scoring barometer between a non VTI and a VTI-enabled environment. In this non-VTI scenario, Geekbench results averaged 1530. Time to start the Vista virtual machine to fully load the desktop was fifty seconds.

Next, VTI was disabled in both BIOS and VirtualBox within the same Vista VM. Geekbench scoring showed no significant difference, 1526 was the average score, and time to cold start the VM to loading the desktop was a minute. This negligibly slower performance could be an indicator that in a real-world environment, involving multi-processors and heavy workloads, software virtualization may offer performance advantages.

In any case, accolades must go to Sun. In the Test Center, it has been the one desktop virtualization product that provided almost no thorny issues setting up a Linux virtual machine on a Vista host.

The only bump reviewers ran into was this message during install, "CPU too old for this kernel." Upgrading the kernel fixed the issue and the Ubuntu 7.10 VM was up and running. KDE desktop installed without a hitch. It was the same with setting up an XP VM on the Vista host. Leaving default memory and virtual hard drive settings made install run smooth. When reviewers attempted to allocate non-default virtual memory and logical drive sizes, the VM froze during the partitioning portion of the install process.

The Linux and XP VMs were configured using the default NAT network interface. Essentially, this allows the VirtualBox networking engine to pass traffic to and from the VM transparently. The VM receives its network addressing information via a DHCP server integrated within VirtualBox and that network addressing scheme differs from the network information of the host.

This default network configuration means that the VM is not accessible from outside of the network. Also, any needed alternate networking scenarios would require further configuration using Host Interface Networking, bridging or port forwarding.

Networking configuration, other than the default, is perhaps not very intuitive and slightly complex. But VirtualBox lends itself to customization, and with the API set, solutions such as creating encrypted authentication provides a good opportunity for VARs to generate revenue on a services-based side, rather than on a licensing side, being that this is open source.

USB support functions the same in the guest VMs as on the host. A USB memory stick was accessible on both VMs.

Other nice features include shared folders, which allows a guest and host to share data even if there is no network connection between them, shared clipboard access and the ability to connect to VMs through Remote Desktop Protocol. The seamless windowing feature is a neat way to integrate the guest OS with the host's interface.

VirtualBox 1.6 now supports seamless windowing in Linux as well as SATA support for up to 32 HDD per VM, and has a web services API for remote management.