I did a bunch of testing this evening between the new VirtualBox 1.5 and VMware server and found something interesting.
Virtualbox seems nice, but networking in it is a pain in the arse! I can only get Windows guests to properly network and then it's only through NAT (hiding behind your host PC's IP address). Various Linux guest images that I have (ArchLinux, Debian) find the network adapters, and can get DHCP assigned IP addresses but will NOT go out to the Internet to finish installing/etc. That's pretty useless. Trying to bridge (make the virtual network card like another physical computer on the network) is a joke with VirtualBox. It does not work "out of the box" and the howtos are long and really turn me off. Maybe my attention span is to short but I didn't feel like doing all those instructions to make it work when VMware "just works".
First point about VMware. Any kind of networking functions you need to do work right out of the box, no problem whatsoever. Need NAT? OK. Need bridging? No problem. It simply does what it's supposed to. Innotek has catching up to do in this regard, big time.
Then I started using the same linux images that I had (ArchLinux and Debian, I wanted my tests to be the same systems) and found VMware server to be much, much faster on the Linux systems. We're talking minutes. Booting ArchLinux to get to a point you can start going through the install steps took my system about 3-5 minutes (I didn't use a stopwatch). Using the same ISO file in VMware it took, oh maybe 30 seconds to get to the same place. Debian was also slow in VirtualBox, but the video refresh was slower in VMware, which didn't effect how quickly the machine ran. (remember, nothing is even installed on any virtual hard disks yet! My linux installs can't go out to the Internet using VirtualBox, remember?)
VMware however looses points on having an Integrated seamless desktop. It's pretty sweet being able to have a windows taskbar/start button at the bottom of my linux screen but be out of the way otherwise. VMware has catching up to do here.
Windows guests seemed to perform approximately the same. Fairly quick install, load time and response times on both VirtualBox and VMware. This goes for both Windows XP and Vista.
One other difference I found, but not directly testable here. VMare supports running 64bit guests if your 64bit CPU supports that particular function. Virtualbox I don't believe will run 64bit guests at all. Period. This is unverified though and I must test for myself at work though since my new tower does support the vmware 64bit guest function.
More testing will be performed on a 64bit system when possible.
Wow, that was long. Hope that gives you some insight...
Virtualbox seems nice, but networking in it is a pain in the arse! I can only get Windows guests to properly network and then it's only through NAT (hiding behind your host PC's IP address). Various Linux guest images that I have (ArchLinux, Debian) find the network adapters, and can get DHCP assigned IP addresses but will NOT go out to the Internet to finish installing/etc. That's pretty useless. Trying to bridge (make the virtual network card like another physical computer on the network) is a joke with VirtualBox. It does not work "out of the box" and the howtos are long and really turn me off. Maybe my attention span is to short but I didn't feel like doing all those instructions to make it work when VMware "just works".
First point about VMware. Any kind of networking functions you need to do work right out of the box, no problem whatsoever. Need NAT? OK. Need bridging? No problem. It simply does what it's supposed to. Innotek has catching up to do in this regard, big time.
Then I started using the same linux images that I had (ArchLinux and Debian, I wanted my tests to be the same systems) and found VMware server to be much, much faster on the Linux systems. We're talking minutes. Booting ArchLinux to get to a point you can start going through the install steps took my system about 3-5 minutes (I didn't use a stopwatch). Using the same ISO file in VMware it took, oh maybe 30 seconds to get to the same place. Debian was also slow in VirtualBox, but the video refresh was slower in VMware, which didn't effect how quickly the machine ran. (remember, nothing is even installed on any virtual hard disks yet! My linux installs can't go out to the Internet using VirtualBox, remember?)
VMware however looses points on having an Integrated seamless desktop. It's pretty sweet being able to have a windows taskbar/start button at the bottom of my linux screen but be out of the way otherwise. VMware has catching up to do here.
Windows guests seemed to perform approximately the same. Fairly quick install, load time and response times on both VirtualBox and VMware. This goes for both Windows XP and Vista.
One other difference I found, but not directly testable here. VMare supports running 64bit guests if your 64bit CPU supports that particular function. Virtualbox I don't believe will run 64bit guests at all. Period. This is unverified though and I must test for myself at work though since my new tower does support the vmware 64bit guest function.
More testing will be performed on a 64bit system when possible.
Wow, that was long. Hope that gives you some insight...
