If you read this blog regularly or heard me speak, you've probably had to endure an enthusiastic rant about virtualization. I think it's a great thing that can make your life much easier. Now that X86 Virtualization is commonly available, we can run a guest operating system just as fast as if it were the only operating system running on the hardware. Nice.
The existing players have a new competitor though... and I think VirtualBox will shake things up a bit.
Here's the state of the product line up as I see it.
Xen is awesome, powerful, open source, cool... and Linux only. And you've got to be a Linux guru to install and run it. Recently it's made huge leaps forward in ease of use, but I only mention it here so I don't get dozens of emails telling me I missed ~the~ major player. It's what your IT department will use, but most end users won't.
Parallels is awesome, and largely responsible for the virtualization arms race on the OS X platform (even though Parallels runs on Windows and Linux too). They got to the Mac first and forced VMWare to play catch up. It's great for the end users when companies have these races though. Both companies have done great work. I've prepaid for the next version of Parallels because of the reputed 3D support. They have screen shots of ID Software games running. (drool).
Parallels has been the best (bar none) for the end user to get up and running. The GUI is trivial to use and the run time performance is awesome. I give my Subversion and Cruise Control talks inside Windows XP using Parallels all the time.
VMWare has been around for years. They have a big vested interest in selling their enterprise products though. So even though they give away the VMWare Player product that can run a virtual machine, creating a new machine seems to require a paid product. That means you can't grab a copy of Windows XP or Kubuntu and make your virtual machine instance. You have to download one someone else made for you. But you'll notice that I said "seems to require". I've been told you can do it yourself for free ~if~ you can figure out some VMWare voodoo. I can't, so VMWare loses out with me. If I can't easily create a new virtual machine, I'll move on.
And now the new kid on the block, VirtualBox. First, it's open source and free. Second, it's cross platform. They've got versions for Windows, Linux, and OS X. Third, it's easy to use.
I pulled down the OS X version, had a nice clean GUI installation, then pulled down a copy of Xubuntu and it just worked.
It doesn't feel quite as fast as my Parallels instance on the same hardware, but I haven't done any real benchmarking. For the money, you can't beat it. If you're just wanting an instance for testing or a LAN server instance, this is the way to go.
I should also mention that VirtualBox has a nice image snapshotting tool that lets you back up a given image before you make major changes.
