[Cialug] Virtualbox Newbie

[L. V. Lammert]

On Fri, 17 May 2013, Nathan C. Smith wrote:

> Is VirtualBox suitable for production workloads or is it more like a
> tool for testing and prototyping and running a second OS when necessary?
>
IME, if you want good performance from a Windoze VM (XP or Win7 tested),
use VB - performance is not the best under Xen or KVM.

It also has some tools that are not straightforward with other systems -
e.g. shared USB and host filesystems.

The only issues we have had with VB are:

1) It is a user oriented application, so any VMs are linked to the base
user, whereas something like Xen is system oriented.

2) When you want to upgrade anything, watch out! VB is pretty 'fragile'
when updating, especially if you use some of the other available tools
like vboxtool (which gives you command line machine control).

	Lee