Oracles Pushes VirtualBox 6.0 Into Public Beta

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Oracles Pushes VirtualBox 6.0 Into Public Beta

Oracle's Munich developers responsible for maintaining the VirtualBox virtualization software this morning announced the first public test release of the upcoming VirtualBox 6.0...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Oracle-VirtualBox-6.0-Beta-1

[bug77]

I believe this is the first time ever I have seen a major release with only two listed features. And one of them is "improved" (whatever that means) GUI.
The sadder part is I don't know of free alternatives to VirtualBox

[waxhead]

I tend to prefer virt-manager/KVM/qemu bit I hope this is a proper release and not just a screwed up GUI with a version number bump. VirtualBox has its use and works great, but these days I an skeptical to what the future brings

[kpedersen]

The sadder part is I don't know of free alternatives to VirtualBox

I think VirtualBox is a great compromise between ease of use and features but there are alternatives:

[OpenSource] QEMU / KVM
[OpenSource] QEMU / Xen
[OpenSource] bhyve on FreeBSD
[Free] VMware Player
[Free] Hyper-V
[Free] VirtualPC

Things like Boxes (https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Boxes) makes using the QEMU based solutions almost as easy as VirtualBox.

But in my experience, little change is the best kind of change. Be happy and embrace the stability

[uid313]

But can it export the virtual machine to Microsoft Azure cloud?
Or to a OpenStack cloud?

[uid313]

Things like Boxes makes using the QEMU based solutions almost as easy as VirtualBox.

Is GNOME Boxes / QEMU as fast as VirtualBox?

[bug77]

I think VirtualBox is a great compromise between ease of use and features but there are alternatives:

[OpenSource] QEMU / KVM
[OpenSource] QEMU / Xen
[OpenSource] bhyve on FreeBSD
[Free] VMware Player
[Free] Hyper-V
[Free] VirtualPC

Things like Boxes (https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Boxes) makes using the QEMU based solutions almost as easy as VirtualBox.

But in my experience, little change is the best kind of change. Be happy and embrace the stability

Those will replace VirtualBox only in some instances. VirtualBox is both cross-platform and open source.
And I'm not against stability, but in the absence of major changes, why jump to the next major release? My guess is this is the next project Oracle tries to either tie to their could or kill and what we have now is a first sign that features will be added at a glacial pace. I'd love to be proven wrong, but this is Oracle we're talking about.

[Britoid]

Is GNOME Boxes / QEMU as fast as VirtualBox?

KVM (the backend QEMU uses on Linux) is faster than VirtualBox afaik. You can also do para-virtualisation.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1404_kvmbox&num=2

[sarfarazahmad]

KVM (the backend QEMU uses on Linux) is faster than VirtualBox afaik. You can also do para-virtualisation.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...4_kvmbox&num=2

Those are ancient. But I bet KVM is still significantly faster than virtualbox.

[Britoid]

Those are ancient. But I bet KVM is still significantly faster than virtualbox.

You can run 100s of KVM/Qemu VMs on a box, I don't think VirtualBox will happily do the same.