Does VirtualBox VM Have Much A Future Left?

[duby229]

What's up with the command line phobia? It's strange hearing it on phoronix forums.

[hiddenmaverick]

What I'd like to see in VirtualBox

I am personally ready to give up on VirtualBox, but since VMware Player isn't licensed for commercial use, and I use a Windows 7 PC at work, I have no other choice for running Linux guests. But for VirtualBox to succeed, I agree that it either needs a fork or better commercial sponsorship than what Oracle has been providing. I miss the Innotek and Sun days when VirtualBox would pioneer new virtualization features with each releases, and when releases were frequent.

These are the things I'd like to see in VirtualBox going forward:

• General bugfixes and cleanups. The codebase has gotten a little stagnant and there are just annoying bugs here and there that could really use attention.
• Open-source USB 2.0 support. Probably not likely to happen.
• USB 3.0 support. It's embarrassing that USB 3.0 has been around for nearly 7 years yet there is no sign that VirtualBox will support it anytime soon. Other virtualization products have full USB 3.0 support.
• Full UEFI 2.x support. The EFI/UEFI support in VirtualBox doesn't work for most guest operating systems.
• Improved volume management support, to dynamically shrink/grow volumes on the fly, or to split volumes and snapshots.

[mcloud]

I use it on linux and it works wonderful. I'm hosting windows guest with 3D and Aero enabled on the experimental drivers.
Wake me up when any OO alternative manages the ease of use of the Virtualbox interface, I only had to use the command line to increase disk size and that's all I ever needed.

[duby229]

That's why when I need to connect to my KVM-hosted VMs from Windows I do it by running virt-manager on Linux in a VirtualBox VM

You can run a VM inside a VM? Last time I tried something similar that experiment failed miserably.

[kobblestown]

What I like most of VirtualBox is its consistency between OSs...KVM+libvirt isn't usable on Windows, for instance.

That's why when I need to connect to my KVM-hosted VMs from Windows I do it by running virt-manager on Linux in a VirtualBox VM

[darkbasic]

qemu's not as difficult as the documentation makes it out to be, especially since version 2.2 added shorthand syntax to set up disk drives. The important thing for decent performance is to use -enable-kvm, -cpu host, and specify more RAM than the paltry 128MB default. This command gets me what I want (and add "-cdrom file.iso" the first time you run to load install media).

qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -cpu host -machine q35 -m 2G -soundhw hda /path/to/disk.img

With qemu the graphic interface has never been as responsive as with virtualbox for me. It seems laggy, as if the pointer does not follow exactly your mouse movements. A tipical VNC behaviour.

[Kano]

The nice thing about vbox is that you usually get updates when it is needed, like you can usually use it with latest kernels. Also the addons are really useful, maybe a little drawback is that not everything is opensource like USB 2.0 support or RDP. But i habe got a simple script to download the extpack. You find vbox preinstalled in Kanotix Special ISO images. Maybe VMware is fester for games, but all i needed was at max an USB printer/scanner. KVM is not really for beginners and you can not integrate it so nicely. I don't see a huge need for changes, if a guest does not work correctly you get usually updates aswell, that's enough for me and many users.

[sjukfan]

Been using virtualbox since back when Innotek made it for OS/2. Have qemu installed too but even with virt-manager I don't think it's as easy to set up. Might be out of laziness though.

[duby229]

What is VirtualBox missing, exactly? Aside from VGA passthrough, I suppose; but then it's becoming less and less needed, given the advances in Wine and a wider variety of native games.

I recently used VirtualBox to set up a "cross-compilation" Windows environment for my card game, and before that to test how far one can go with using only GPL software on Gentoo.

I wouldn't say it's missing anything critical. Just that it needs rebased. It needs cleaned up and bug fixed. It's obviously bitrotting.

[r_a_trip]

qemu's not as difficult as the documentation makes it out to be, especially since version 2.2 added shorthand syntax to set up disk drives. The important thing for decent performance is to use -enable-kvm, -cpu host, and specify more RAM than the paltry 128MB default. This command gets me what I want (and add "-cdrom file.iso" the first time you run to load install media).

qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -cpu host -machine q35 -m 2G -soundhw hda /path/to/disk.img

This might be easy for developers and seasoned users, but not everybody likes the CLI. For these people the friendly GUI interface of VBox is a life saver. CLI for them is a no go and Virt-manager + KVM/Qemu is an incomprehensible cornucopia of options and switches. It's too bad there is no visible competition in the friendly, do-it-at-home virtualisation market on Linux.

Has Gnome Boxes progressed lately?