Sun’s VirtualBox package has been gaining steady ground on other virualization solutions in the areas of desktop os virtualization for some time now. Many have found VirtualBox 2 to be quite fast and snappy running Windows XP guest operating systems on Linux hosts. Version 3 was recently released that provided official support for things that they were previously experimenting with, like 3d acceleration for D3D and OpenGL applications on the guest OS. It’s even rumored to perform well playing games like Halflife 2.
I find it very handy in my day to day life in using applications that I would like to use, but haven’t bothered with because it would mean dual booting and shutting down to switch to a natively installed Windows install. One example is the Garmin GPS mapping software. It’s miles ahead of anything available in the open source world, and doesn’t run well on Linux under the Wine emulator. VirtualBox has allowed me to install and run Windows XP inside my normal linux environment, plug in my GPS, attach the usb device to the virtual machine with the click of a menu option, and use the Garmin mapping software as normal with no noticeable performance hits.
Another huge use for virtualization in general is in website and application development testing. It allows me to run multiple native environments to test and investigate problems with the exact versions of software reported to cause a problem, then roll back to previous versions once I’m done. It’s even added a layer of safety to these investigations. I can investigate things that, if something goes wrong, could cause serious damage to an operating system, like figuring out exactly how web based malware infects a computer. I can watch it infect the guest OS, then just revert back to a previous snapshot leaving everything the way it was before the attempt, including the filesystem!
Interested in desktop virtualization? Check out VirtualBox and VMware, the two most commonly used desktop virtualization packages. VirtualBox is completely free, whereas you might need to buy a VMware license depending on how you want to use it.
