Sun Microsystems VirtualBox
Wow - Sun microsystems has been busy - discreetly releasing and/or acquiring all kinds of important open source software projects. The banner of logos shown above just about summarizes it.
Today I discovered VirtualBox while working on a cluster computing project. VirtualBox isn’t directly related to cluster computing, but it can be used to run multiple compute nodes for testing. VirtualBox is an open-source equivalent to VMWare’s popular VMWare Workstation product. With the performance of today’s hardware, the ability to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single machine is becoming a reality for more and more people.
The basic idea is that by installing VirtualBox you install an application and a small set of services that allow you to create virtual machines for running an entirely different operating system in a window on your host operating system. I have just completed an install of the latest version of the Debian OS into a virtual machine. The entire process (including the several hundred megabyte download) took less than one hour to complete. Now I can boot up a Linux operating system whenever I want to run an application only available in Linux ( e.g., Kmines 
).
The screenshots below give you a glimpse into how it works. The first screenshot shows the virtual machine configuration options, which represents everything you would find on a real machine. The second shows Linux running in a window on my Windows Vista host operating system.
March 6th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
I know its not for Linux, but I just recently stumbled upon Virtual PC (http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx), which Microsoft apparently bought a few years back. I’m tri-booting right now (XP/Win7/Linux) but it’s kind of nice when I’m in Win7 and don’t really feel like rebooting to get into XP. I would like to use VMWare myself, but Virtual PC is also free. I’ll need to look into Virtual Box for when I am in Linux…
March 16th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Yeah, I tried out an older version of Virtual PC, but I haven’t tried the updated version. Does it come by default with Windows 7? How is the performance? I have been very happy with the performance of Sun’s Virtualbox running on Windows. I’ve updated the screenshot to show that I am running Vista as the host and Debian Linux as the guest.
September 15th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Jason,
VirtualPC isn’t free, you just don’t have to pay for it.
The charming advantage of VirtualBox is, that it runs on Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Solaris as host systems — thus, if you have, for example, Ubuntu on your Desktop and Windows XP on your Laptop (because Linux just doesn’t support the integrated chipset), or you’re the happy owner of a MacBook (Pro), you can just run Virtualbox. No hassle.
The only downside, that I can see, is that Mac OS X doesn’t run (yet) as a client inside VirtualBox.