Review: VirtualBox

VirtualBox
http://www.virtualbox.org

VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

I finally had a chance today to play around with VirtualBox. I must say that I am impressed. I have used VMware a lot in the past and I thought VirtualBox was a lot quicker and easier to download, install, and configure than VMware. I needed a Ubuntu 8.04 Server install so I could serve DNS and SMTP for my personal home and development environments.

All of the configuration and initial setup was very easy to figure out and intuitive. The only kinks I had with Ubuntu was:

• During initial boot I got this message: This kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU: 0:6
  • Fixed by checking the PAE/NX checkbox in the machine settings.
    • General -> Advanced Tab -> Enable PAE/NX
• The default network adapter settings will set it to use NAT. It gave my virtual machine an IP that I could not hit from my other workstations.
  • Switched the network settings to attach it to the host’s interface
    • Network -> Adapter 1 Tab -> Attached to: Host Interface
• I had to setup Postfix to relay mail for my local network
• I had to configure Bind9 to have a reverse record for my local domain ubuntu.dev

Other than that, everything was excellent and I highly recommend VirtualBox for anyone interested in virtualization.