Does VirtualBox VM Have Much A Future Left?

[ultimA]

...I think there must be some confusion here, there are definitely more than four of us! I think reports of our death must have been slightly, should I say, exaggerated? I won't go into too any detail, but as one commenter said, take a look at our svn log to see what we are working on. Hope you will enjoy the results!

, don't worry about it, Michael just loves to post "news" like this time-to-time, just to stir up the forums. VirtualBox is still a great product. Sure, some other virtualization solutions work better in/for some situations, but VirtualBox also has its unique selling points. I don't care if you are paid developers or not, I am convinced you are doing us a great a service by developing this (mostly) free software. Keep up the good work and thank you.

[jelabarre59]

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.

Virtualized USB drives (bootable). For example, if you were trying out some OS being provided as a USB-image download, you shouldn't have to hunt down and write the image down to a physical drive. You should be able to test them out directly from the image. For that matter, I don't even remember if you ban boot from USAB at all. It also would be useful to *create* those images this way. I requested it years ago and all I got was a whiney response that they couldn't think of a use case.

They also added code to support certificates in MSWindows, but they failed to make it an option that could be SHUT OFF in case it conflicted with security code already on the system. All the vbox people do is whine that you need to remove the other offending code (as if you could on a work machine) rather than fixing it on their end (it has a serious conflict with Symantec software).

I'd think getting outside developers writing 3rd-party extension packs would be a great benefit to VBox over other virtualization options. The BSD, OS2/ecomstation, ReactOS, etc projects could make their OSes work great in a VM.

[Zoom]

Virtualized USB drives (bootable).

Actually, you can boot from USB drive, but, strangely, not with the GUI.
It's done by creating a virtual disk attached to the drive, and then booting from it.
https://gist.github.com/mapio/8470611

Here's windows how-to:
http://www.howtogeek.com/187721/how-...in-virtualbox/

[SystemCrasher]

Yes, sounds like the future is almost here. I've been waiting for the future since the past. I'm so excited!

And, somehow, it means even more competiton for VBox. So it going to have hard times I guess. Regardless of what Oracle employees are mumbling.

[ormaaj]

Basically I do not get who will develop VBox and why they will do it.

To my knowledge Virtualbox is the only maintained, reasonably simple to use, free virtual machine of its kind for Windows. The unofficial windows builds of qemu have been stagnant for years so it's probably no longer viable. For those that have no option but Windows (e.g. corporate policy), and cannot use hyper-v for whatever reason, virtualbox may be the only option. As I recall, virtualbox doesn't even require administrative permissions to install and run, but it's been years since I've checked.


This indicates to me that virtualbox fills a significant need and it's likely somebody will be motivated to maintain it. I do wish there were still a qemu windows port though.

[Mandrake]

Originally Posted by ormaaj
To my knowledge Virtualbox is the only maintained, reasonably simple to use, free virtual machine of its kind for Windows. The unofficial windows builds of qemu have been stagnant for years so it's probably no longer viable.

Qemu has unofficial windows builds from last month. VMware Player is free and not reasonably more difficult than Virtualbox to use.

[reCAPTCHA]

Qemu has unofficial windows builds from last month. VMware Player is free and not reasonably more difficult than Virtualbox to use.

VMware Player? Despite It received some feature updates in the last time, like ability to create a VM, SSD pass trough etc, it is still not in the same class as VB, which offers a lot more than basics provided by Player.

[bitman]

Also Qemu isnt that useful without kvm (meaning on windows). Stuff like virtio/vfio are invaluable.