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Forge wrote:

... I don't know that VBox can even boot OSX guests or hosts at all yet.

It can.

hans wrote:

Forge wrote:

bthylafh wrote:

... I don't know that VBox can even boot OSX guests or hosts at all yet.

It can.

VB for OS X is one of the downloads listed on their site, and OS X shows up in the drop-down of possible guest OSes when you create a new VM.

hans wrote:

Forge wrote:

bthylafh wrote:

... I don't know that VBox can even boot OSX guests or hosts at all yet.

It can.

Fix your attributions, I didn't say that.

just brew it! wrote:

bthylafh wrote:

You need at least a 2.6.25 kernel to use the virtio NIC. I suppose we'll need to wait a bit longer before they make that default for Linux guests, alas.

2.6.25 is over 6 years old. I don't think it would be unreasonable to make the virtio NIC the default when creating new Linux guests.

Depends on how they do it. Right now the generic Linux defaults are for 2.2, 2.4, and 2.6/3.x kernels. If they split the latter into 2.6.24 & below and 2.6.25+ (or just split it out to 2.6 and 3.x) maybe it'd be practicable.

bthylafh wrote:

Forge wrote:

bthylafh wrote:

but for VMware you have to either hammer the key to get into the BIOS setup or just edit the .vmx file.

That actually got fixed quite a while back. Now you power off VM, right click, Power->Power on to bios and poof. No key hammering.

In Player or just Workstation? I don't see that option on my copy of the latest Player.

I know it's in Workstation, believed it was in Player as well. Jeez, if that's what VMware is adding to differentiate Player from Workstation, I think they're Doing It Wrong.

hans wrote:

Forge wrote:

... I don't know that VBox can even boot OSX guests or hosts at all yet.

It can.

VB for OS X is one of the downloads listed on their site, and OS X shows up in the drop-down of possible guest OSes when you create a new VM.[/quote]

Gnarly. I'll test that out immediately-ish.

(attribution corrected)

I've been using Vmware for years - it generally works smoothly, and I've had more driver issues in Virtualbox (ex. old versions or new/beta versions of Windows). To be fair, I am using vmware workstation, but even with the limited features of player I'd still rather go that route rather than virtualbox.

I think VMware Player is a little more speedy and probably more polished (less bugs) than Virtualbox, but Virtualbox gets my vote due to snapshots.

Not sure if I should post this here, but everybody here seems very knowledgeable, so here goes :

For grins, I'd like to install Netware 5 (or 4.11) in either VirtualBox or VMWare. I used to be a CNE (4.x/5), and I'm ashamed to admit I haven't touched it in ages. I think I even lost my guides...

Which VM would be easiest for me to get a Netware server up and running to tinker with? It's doubtful I'd have it on a network (unless in can run it in GNS3, with DOS hosts running the client? ), although I wouldn't mind testing the IPX to IP translator/router one more time.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

*EDIT*

Also, anybody know if the 2 user student copies of 4.11 and 5.1 are still available for download? Google keeps pointing me to NW6.5, and that's not what I'm after.

I like VMware and HyperV. Both have their perks and drawbacks. Enabling Hyper-V disables certain hardware registers including the WHEA error system (which has caused me extra hassles but probably won't matter for most users), but on the flipside it's much better about keeping disk space usage to a minimum across differential (linked) virtual disks, and doesn't require constant disk cleanup management per VM as VMware did. It's also much better about handling max CPU loads without affecting the primary OS. And in my opinion the whole Gen 2 VM feature is way beyond overdue in the virtual machine era, yet only HyperV has it. Being able to turn a Windows 8 VM off/on within 3 seconds is light years beyond what I saw with VMware.

I can't really compare to VirtualBox as the last time I used it was several years ago, and the system load blancing + graphics acceleration was terrible which forced me to adopt VMware at the time. I'm sure both drivers & VBox have improved since then but I'm still biased because of it.

Kougar wrote:

I can't really compare to VirtualBox as the last time I used it was several years ago, and the system load blancing + graphics acceleration was terrible which forced me to adopt VMware at the time. I'm sure both drivers & VBox have improved since then but I'm still biased because of it.

VirtualBox seems more interested in maintaining (approximate) feature parity than in improving performance. Depending on your use case this may or may not be an issue. It has worked well enough for me that I continue to use it.

Kougar wrote:

I like VMware and HyperV. Both have their perks and drawbacks. Enabling Hyper-V disables certain hardware registers including the WHEA error system

I've mentioned this to you before, but Hyper-V does not disable WHEA feedback in the event viewer.

http://www.hyper-v.nu/archives/mvaneijk ... ster-node/

The parent partition in Hyper-V still has direct hardware access.

One other feature (though it's entirely separate from Virtualbox) of VirtualBox is Vagrant. At the simplest definition, it's a CLI wrapper around vboxmanage commands. For example:

vagrant init precise64
vagrant up
vagrant ssh

Those three lines will create a Ubuntu 12.04 VM (the exact label of the first command may be wrong, from memory here), boot it, and then ssh into it. You can create a Vagrantfile which defines the configuration - virtual hardware, mapping of host shared folders, networking, etc. There are plugins that will automate the installation of latest vbox additions, give a command for snapshots, etc. Pretty great stuff for dev environments.

Ryu Connor wrote:

Kougar wrote:

I like VMware and HyperV. Both have their perks and drawbacks. Enabling Hyper-V disables certain hardware registers including the WHEA error system

I've mentioned this to you before, but Hyper-V does not disable WHEA feedback in the event viewer.

http://www.hyper-v.nu/archives/mvaneijk ... ster-node/

The parent partition in Hyper-V still has direct hardware access.

I thought the jury was undecided on this. HyperV does disable some things, because CPUZ doesn't even detect VTx, VTd, and TSX instruction sets from within the primary OS. Intel's own processor tool ID tool simply says they're disabled even if I have HyperV running.

just brew it! wrote:

By "physical devices" do you mean disk drives, or devices in general? Because there *is* a way to assign raw block devices or partitions to a VM via VBoxManage commands. This is covered in the Advanced Topics section of the VirtualBox manual.

This was fun. I'm happy to report that FreeNAS is running as a VirtualBox guest on a Linux Mint 17 host with direct access to 4 disks. ZFS (set up as encrypted RaidZ2) seems quite happy. Performance is just fine. The only issue is that the disks do not spin down, but I (hope I) might just need to tweak some settings (host's hdparm.conf, or timing of snapshots and scrubbing in the guest) to fix that. The plan is to beat it up for a week or so before I start to trust it with any data that I care about.

Heh. The idea of running ZFS in a VirtualBox VM to store important data seems vaguely scary to me.

Spindown - I don't think that will work. The hypervisor will establish and keep a lock on those disks while the VM is powered on, and that will look like disk activity to the host.

But if you don't care about spinup/spindown, that should work fine, and be extra responsive, at some idle power cost.

just brew it! wrote:

vaguely scary to me.

Yeah, to me as well. I actually built this box to run FreeNAS natively, but booted it up into Linux to test/burn-in the hardware, check temps and tune fan speeds, etc.. Once Linux was up, I couldn't resist playing. FreeNAS documentation is pretty clear about recommending against this setup.

Forge wrote:

some idle power cost.

Good point on the hypervisor lock. An "hdparm -y ..." on the host didn't even keep them in standby for more than a few seconds. Though I was happy the whole thing didn't lock up. The four disks are WD Blacks, and my Seasonic Power Angel (similar to a Kill-a-Watt) says the difference between idle and standby is 30 to 35 watts total. That's too much waste for 24x7 operation.

I've been a pretty heavy VMware user at work for about 5 years, it's pretty good overall haven't had many problems with it. Updating used to be a bit of a pain for ESXi but it has gotten better, I find VMWare Workstation decent enough although kinda pricey. If you are just running basic VMs for a bit of tinkering or testing then Virtual Box should be more than adequate. The benefits of using VMWare is when you need to start doing more complex stuff, migrate or convert VMs. I haven't used any snapshotting functionality in VirtualBox but that is one key area where VMWare has been extremely useful.

hans wrote:

One other feature (though it's entirely separate from Virtualbox) of VirtualBox is Vagrant.

Agreed. We use it at work quite extensively for development. Our engineers (including myself) run a combination of Linux/Windows/MacOS depending on personal preference. We use vagrant+VBox to get a consistent run-time/deployment environment for our software while developing (web-apps) while making it very easy to switch between which version of our software is being worked on at the moment (and the different environment it needs) and also making it very easy to get a new developer up and running quickly when they join our team.

What used to take 3 days to get up and running now takes 30 minutes... and there's no more guesswork about whether your did it right.