Does VirtualBox VM Have Much A Future Left?

[not.sure]

In a way I agree with you. But it's biggest drawback is it's reliance on vnc to draw the display. It's sooo painfully slow. VNC is terrible.

Use spice rather than VNC. I didn't compare them directly, but spice works fine here..

[ihatemichael]

I use KVM on occasion but otherwise I'm satisfied with VirtualBox. First is the convenient QT GUI to manage all the settings as well as importing/exporting VMs. Second is the guest additions being Linux friendly as most of the time it can be found the the default repo and scales the display/sharing folder properly. Third is the CLI integration with many third party programs such as Vagrant, Docker Machine, Genymotion, etc. I've experimented with running Docker in a VM running in VirtualBox that's running in a Docker container.

What does QuickTime have to do with virtualization?

[duby229]

Use spice rather than VNC. I didn't compare them directly, but spice works fine here..

I'll have to do that soon. I have been using VMWare, but if qemu with spice performs ok, I may consider pitching it.

[duby229]

What does QuickTime have to do with virtualization?

I'm pretty sure everyone here knows exactly what he meant, including you.

In the end it was -you- that mentioned quicktime.

[elapsed]

The only thing I need from VirtualBox is them to lift the dumb VRAM limit.

I want to run Windows in a VM for games, and I'm not really interested in installing WINE. VirtualBox isn't a solution with the VRAM limit. GPUs are coming with 4GB+ of VRAM these days and games are using more and more.

I think the limit was something ridiculous like 256MB. Totally useless and the main reason why I still have to (annoyingly) dual boot Windows, and as a result, spend a lot more time in Windows than I'd like, because of the annoyance of rebooting.

[duby229]

The only thing I need from VirtualBox is them to lift the dumb VRAM limit.

I want to run Windows in a VM for games, and I'm not really interested in installing WINE. VirtualBox isn't a solution with the VRAM limit. GPUs are coming with 4GB+ of VRAM these days and games are using more and more.

I think the limit was something ridiculous like 256MB. Totally useless and the main reason why I still have to (annoyingly) dual boot Windows, and as a result, spend a lot more time in Windows than I'd like, because of the annoyance of rebooting.

Even if you could increase the amount of GPU RAM that gets virtualized, I believe it's system RAM anyway. Although, a while ago I read about some work on qemu to support GPU passthrough, so if you have a second video card you could pass that through the virtualization and use the actual hardware.

[GreatEmerald]

In this particular case, Oracle bought Sun for the sole purpose of using their patents to sue Google; thank god that effort fell flat on its face, at least. OpenSolaris is dead, OpenOffice got ripped in half, and now VirtualBox is slowly wasting away. What a waste.

You're also forgetting Java and MySQL.

[Maxim Levitsky]

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

Although the parent poster sure referred to run a separate VM, but on vmware nested virtualization is somewhat possible

This is what I did for amusement.

[duby229]

Looks like: Gnome-2 < OSX < Vista < 98.

Interesting.

[chrisb]

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

Using the command line is harder with qemu... consider the workflow:

• Create VM, boot Linux ISO, install Linux
• Install accelerated video drivers so desktop doesn't suck
• Take a snapshot (from desktop, live without shutting down the VM)
• Make some changes, take another snapshot
• Revert to first snapshot, delete 2nd snapshot

In Virtualbox this is all simple and quick, in particular making a live snapshot, reverting, and deleting a snapshot are each a single button click. Easy. Installing the host drivers is a single menu click. A user could perform the whole above workflow in a few minutes.

But with qemu, it seems like it was easy to start a VM, but harder to do all of the other things that people commonly do with VMs. Part of the issue is that when you have a window that represents something, users want to be able to interact with that window in a graphical way. It's like trying to use the commandline to interact with a web browser - it might be possible, but it's going to be slower than using a mouse. Maybe VirtualBox does a better job of making common operations quick. Also, VM technology has evolved over time, and the qemu documentation is stale or hard to find eg. searching for "qemu snaphshots" on google, the top 4 links are to docs on qemu.org, but none mention the "savevm" command - the top hit for "qemu create snapshot" is http://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/CreateSnapshot but that doesn't actually tell you about the "savevm" command either... (Maybe "snapshot" used to mean "clone a disk image", but in modern VM terminology, a snapshot includes all data of the running VM, so which makes the qemu pages confusing)