VirtualBox – virtualization made easy

I have recently discovered a very cool product and felt I had to share it. It;s called VirtualBox and what it does is let you host a guest operating system within a Window on your computer. After an easy installation, it has a Wizard to walk you through setting up your first Virtual Machine. I decided to try it out by creating a Linux guest on my Windows XP machine. It was so easy and quick to setup that I didn’t beleive I had actually completed the task when I did. It took me longer to download the ISO image for Kubuntu than it did to setup the environment.

The wizard walks you through deciding:

• which type of OS & File system will be loaded
• how much of your host computer disk space you will allocate
• how much of your host computer memory you will allocate
• how much memory to allocate to video memory
• whether to have your host CD/DVD drive available to the new OS
• How you want to handle networking (NAT, use Host connection, get it’s own IP address)
• whether or not you want USB devices supported in the new OS
• etc…

In my case, on my 2gb RAM laptop, I allocated 512kb to my Kubuntu environment, however I have since adjusted it down to 256kb and it works just fine.

Here is a snapshot of the main screen

This is a cheap (it’s free) alternative to VMWare and it’s far less complicated.

VirtualBox has versions that run in Windows and Linux, and you can host Apple OS in either environment, although I haven’t tried that. It also has a strong set of APIs so that, if you were inclined, you could build your own virtual applications with VirtualBox underneath.

VirtualBox is now owned by Sun and indeed when you download, you are redirected to Sun’s site.

For anyone looking for a good, cheap virtualization software, I’d highly recommend it. And if you aren’t looking for virtualzation software, I’d say still check it out. It’s make a great way to test out and play with a new OS (such as Linux if you are a Windows user), test the effects of updates and new software on your system without killing your main system, and from a support perspective, would allow you to re-create a customer’s environment and test, while leaving your main system intact.

Check it out.