Submitted by To enable organizations and developers to more easily and flexibly create and deploy on premises and cloud applications, we are pleased to announce the general availability of Oracle VM VirtualBox 5.1, the latest release of the world’s most popular free and open source, cross-platform virtualization software.
Not a huge release, but, while an Oracle product, it’s a must-have in the toolbox of anyone interested in running and playing with older operating systems.
That’s true, but I run all of my client software in it. I no longer run anything on my host machine – everything is run in VMs. I use VirtualBox (the free software version) because I use several different families of OS, so I can’t use a KVM kind of solution.
VirtualBox also made it easy to transition away from Window (except for certain work-related functions that require it). First, I installed all of my software into VMs, then moved all the data into shared folders (or network storage). That made it easy to make the final step of moving the VMs from the Windows host to a *nix host.
Now I can change the host OS any time I want. One of these days, I’m going to set up a Genode host, and see how that goes. :^)
Pro-Competition
That’s definitely a plus, I only wish accelerated graphics were better supported inside guests. I try the acceleration option in virtualbox but I haven’t had much luck with it.
What are “guest utilities”?
piotr.dobrogost,
What I’m referring to is the virtualbox guest addon CD, which is basically a driver pack to make the guest play nicer with the host.
– guest drivers increase performance by bypassing the hardware emulation, although KVM can do that as well.
– you can resize a virtualbox VM window as though it were any other application, the guest OS instantly resizes it’s virtual display to fit the window. This is so much better than the pixel-scaling and/or scrollbars that we end up with by emulating a fixed display adapter.
– the mouse integration between host & guest is more natural
– file sharing is much more natural, drag and drop works, clipboard works. With Qemu/KVM, there are so many times I’ve mistakenly tried to use copy/paste between the host and guest, forgetting that it wouldn’t work. So I’m forced to save it on a network share, navigate and open it on the host, the inability to copy/paste totally ruins my workflow, and is a huge disadvantage for KVM compared to virtualbox.
– memory ballooning allows the guest to free unused memory back to the host.
– ability to control/monitor processes in the guest from the host.
– 3d acceleration in guest (it’s broken for me)
– seamless mode to render guest windows on host (it’s broken for me too, but would be a very cool feature if it worked, I’ve been told that vmware works better).
Here’s the virtualbox documentation for it:
http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html
Unrelated to guest utilities, but something I’ve come to appreciate is how easy it is to connect USB devices to virtualbox guests on the fly. It can be very handy at times.
Was going to say the same thing, i find it so much easier to have a developer machine as well as various configured machine Win7 + Office2010, Win8 + Office 2013 for testing and support.
Been a big fan of virtualbox for a long while now and it’s so useful.
…I find its RPM packaging a bit frustrating. On CentOS for example, a “yum update” will *not* upgrade VirtualBox between two minor point releases, which is frankly maddening.
For example, this 5.1 release required me to:
yum remove VirtualBox-5.0
yum install VirtualBox-5.1
This is because the version number is actually in the package name field (bzzzt!) – something LibreOffice.org RPMs also highly dubiously do.