Virtual Box is a
powerful virtualization product for enterprise as well as
home use.It is not only an extremely feature rich, high performance
product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution
that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU
General Public License (GPL) version 2.
Presently,
Virtual Box runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris hosts and supports a
large number of guest operating systems.
Features of VirtualBox
Portability
VirtualBox
runs on a large number of 32-bit and 64-bit host operating systems To a very
large degree, VirtualBox is functionally identical on all of the host
platforms.It uses same file and image formats.This allows you to run
virtual machines created on one host on another host with a different host
operating system; for example, you can create a virtual machine on Windows and
then run it under Linux.
No hardware virtualization required
For
many scenarios, VirtualBox does not require the processor features built into
newer hardware like Intel VT-x or AMD-V. As opposed to many other
virtualization solutions, you can therefore use VirtualBox even on older
hardware where these features are not present.
Guest Additions
The
VirtualBox Guest Additions are software packages which can be installed of
supported inside guest systems to improve their performance and to provide
additional integration and communication with the host system. After installing
the Guest Additions, a virtual machine will support automatic adjustment of
video resolutions,accelerated 3D graphics and more.
Guest multiprocessing (SMP)
VirtualBox can present up to 32 virtual CPUs to each virtual machine,
irrespective of how many CPU cores are physically present on your host.
USB device support
VirtualBox
implements a virtual USB controller and allows you to connect arbitrary USB
devices to your virtual machines without having to install device-specific
drivers on the host. USB support is not limited to certain device categories.
VM groups
VirtualBox
provides a groups feature that enables the user to organize virtual machines
collectively, as well as individually. In addition to basic groups, it is also
possible for any VM to be in more than one group, and for groups to be nested
in a hierarchy. In general, the operations that can be performed on groups are
the same as those that can be applied to individual VMs i.e. Start, Pause,
Reset, Close.
Advantages of
VirtualBox
·
Snapshots
·
64-bit
·
Shared
folders
·
Special
drivers and utilities to facilitate switching between systems
·
Command
line interaction (in addition to the GUI)
Disadvantages of VirtualBox
o
Poor performance with 32-bit guests on
AMD CPUs. This affects mainly Windows and Solaris guests, but possibly also
some Linux kernel revisions. Partially solved in 3.0.6 for 32 bits Windows NT,
2000, XP and 2003 guests. Requires 3.0.6 or higher Guest Additions to be installed.
o
Mac OS X guests can only run on a certain
host hardware.
o
VirtualBox does not provide Guest Additions
for Mac OS X at this time.
o
There is no support for USB devices connected
to Solaris 10 hosts.
o
No ACPI information (battery status, power
source) is reported to the guest.
o
No support for using wireless adapters with
bridged networking.
