Virtual machines

[buckED]

Hello friends,

I am probably a few years behind with this, but I just discovered an interest
in virtual machines.

And by virtual machines I mean mostly running several OSs on the same
machine. That would give me a chance, for instance, to finally give Linux a
try withoutfully retiring windows yet.

So I am looking for some advice from people who actually have some experience using such virtual machines.

1. What application do you use to create and run your VM?
VirtualBox, Parallels, VMware?
What are the advantages and disadvantages?
What else is there to consider.

2. Besides running another OS, what other usefully applications do you use VMs for?

3. Where do I find useful resources / info on the topic?

Thanks a bunch and cheers,

Ed
[Edit : forgot to add I am running win 7 professional 64 bit.]

[pratty70]

Hi,
I develop (using Ogre) on MAC OSX, windows and Linux.
I've used virtualisation for a number of years, VMWare, VirtualBox and more recently Parallels - as I now do everything on my iMac.
I've found virtualbox excellent, because it's free - and did most of what I wanted, but low level support for USB for example, left it a bit lacking for my needs.
I bought Parallels desktop 6 (see my Ogre performance comparisons summary here http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic. ... ls#p413327) and summarised some of my findings between that and VMWare Fusion (both mac packages)
I run gentoo linux excellently on it - and I also have done the same on Virtual box - but I don't remember whether I had true GL support under X on virtualbox.
VMs are useful for trying installers - install your software - if it kills the OS - then you can restore the VM to a snapshot - rehash your installer and try again.
Anything else specific you want to know, just ask.
Cheers
Chris

[buckED]

Thanks for your quick reply

The next one may or may not be a rather dumb question:

How easily can data be transfered between different vms or my 'actual' OS and a virtual one.

Assume I was writing an application on windows and wanted to check for Linux compatibility.
My two 'machines' are in fact two seperate entities at this point, even though they theoretically reside on the same hardware. So the question is, can I from within my vm access my harddrive that I wrote to from my main OS?

Hope this makes any sense.

[pratty70]

OK, the answer is, quite easily.
When you create a VM and install an OS - you can then install Parallels tools (or VMware tools - or virtual box tools, lol) which provide accelerated graphics, network integration, etc.... and also disk access from the guest OS - so on my MAC, the MAC directory structure is available from my windows guest, and my linux virtual disk mounts the MAC file structure under /mnt/psf for example. Like I said also networking works too. So, for example, I can sit in the other room and over my wireless network, remote desktop in to the windows virtual machine on the MAC as though it was a windows machine on the network in it's own right.
Hope this helps.
Cheers
Chris

[buckED]

That is indeed a satisfying answer to my question.

Thanks a lot.

[lonewolff]

I am surprised that we haven't made it to the time where we can run two operating systems simulatenously natively.

How hard could it be? Dedicate half the cores to one OS and the other half to the other and have some sort of BIOS switch or something that can change 'focus' to the OS you want to use.

Maybe a new project? Lol!

[exxerfer]

i've been using VirtualBox for 2 years:

- its free
- ease of installation ... windows files will be available on linux
- quick installation and readiness to work in just 15 minutes

[betajaen]

I use VirtualBox all the time.

I tend to avoid having programs such as Flash or PDF readers on my main Windows computer, due to the insecurities. So I have a VirtualBox installation of Ubuntu with Firefox/Flash in it. Playing video works remarkably well, apart from full screen which has poor performance. My Windows Firefox browser only goes to two/three websites (I have rule), so anything else I just use this VirtualBox as a Sandboxed Firefox. Problem is, I can't have youtube playing in the background with windowed games running (Minecraft), as the computer almost runs out of memory.

I have a second VirtualBox VM, running Ubuntu again. Which is only for personal stuff; email, purchasing, etc. So if malware managed to get onto my computer, it's extremely unlikely it could get at my details in the VM.

[lonewolff]

Man, that is security conscious.

I use native Windows for everything. Never had a virus

[spacegaier]

Same here. Never really had troubles on native Windows. I only have two VMs in VirtualBox: One with Ubuntu to connect to my vServer and one with Win XP for some business stuff.

But betajaen is known to be very security aware indeed. But you never know what will happen, so one day we might ask ourselves why we didn't follow him on this path .

[lonewolff]

Can't see it myself

[betajaen]

Never had a virus

I've had one virus in my computing days, a boot-block virus on an old Public Domain disk my father found once on my Amiga, but apart from that nada. But, I always plan for the worst, and I don't tend to trust closed source software that much apart from big companies such as Microsoft. Which I know is shocking from my Amiga background, but I've matured a little.

Then there is my 85 character email password, but that's another story.....

[pratty70]

I did use VirtualBox very successfully previous to Parallels. I ran Linux and Windows on Mac. I also ran a previous version on Windows on Vista (for various compatibility reasons) and also Linux on Vista. The move to parallels was driven by the need for low level USB support which wasn't so hot on Virtual box. Sometimes I would insert a memory stick and virtual box would just refuse to see it - or the host would not release it. It became a pain as I write raw to USB memory sticks A LOT. As a result, I tried Parallels and Vmware fusion on the Mac (as that's my main tool of choice now) and Parallels came out on top for me.