VMWare beware: Sun’s FOSS VirtualBox hits the sweet spot for Linux

by David M Williams

Monday, 11 August 2008

Page 2 of 3 This means that you can use a command-line tool that comes with VirtualBox to control your virtual machines; they can be managed within shell scripts in an automated fashion. Or, if you don’t like the Qt front-end you can write your own (using GTK, say) but need not mess with any of the gory details of virtualisation at all. Any coder skilled at user interfaces could produce this no matter their expertise with virtual machines. Lifting the lid, the way this is achieved is twofold. Firstly, all the parts of the program code that deal with virtualisation are wrapped up in a single shared library called VBoxVMM.so (or VBoxVMM.dll under Windows.) This can, for all intents and purposes, be considered a black box which encapsulates everything needed to virtualise a computer, without any respect to how the user will interact with it. Secondly, as mentioned, the package runs as a service called VBoxSVC. The default GUI front end executes under the process name VirtualBox, and this fires off VBoxSVC if it is not already running. This modularity is unique and clever and will make savvy developers and infrastructure experts salivate and ooze with creative ideas. Sure, this feature may be no big deal if your needs are reasonably simple like personal experimentation on a single computer. If you are wishing to consolidate a sizeable server farm into a few easier to handle virtualised systems then this is a huge boon. You have greater flexibility and control, you can adapt the interface, and you can avoid wasting memory on graphical front ends if they are not useful in your environment. (Besides the Qt GUI and command-line interface an RDP server is also available with the fuller, non-open source, version of VirtualBox. This server causes the virtual machines to run without any graphical output on the host but permit remote computers to connect via the terminal services/remote desktop protocol. The client PCs then merely produce RDP data for output.) You can obtain VirtualBox from the Sun Download Centre. Binaries for various Linux distributions as well as Windows and MacOS versions are available. A user manual is included but can also be downloaded separately. Additionally, the source code is available free of charge and, as stated earlier, is licensed under the GNU General Public License. As you should expect, VirtualBox provides guest additions for Windows and Linux virtual machines allowing improved performance and seamless mouse pointer integration. Folders can be shared between the host environment and the guest operating system. The full edition of VirtualBox permits arbitrary USB devices to be connected to your virtual machines; this is something that Microsoft’s Virtual PC still does not provide although VMWare does. However, VirtualBox takes it further: it provides a nifty USB over RDP feature that allows the virtual RDP server to access arbitrary USB devices which are connected on the RDP client machine! A word has to be made about the full edition. The above features are still available for free; both editions of VirtualBox are free, but only the professional version comes with RDP and USB and USB over RDP support. This version is downloadable only as a pre-compiled binary. It is not GPL’d nor is it open source. CONTINUED << First page <   1 2 3 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

< Next story in category		Previous story in the category >

Visitors last 30 days Suscribers

904,266 13,751