Can VirtualBox and VMWare co-exist on the same machine?

[ptemmerman]

Hi all,

I got some virtual machines running in VMware Server and due to recent problems I decided to give VirtualBox a shot.
I've got both installed on a Centos 5.2 64bits 2.26.18.

When no VirtualBox virtual machines are running I can start any VMware virtual machine without problems.
But, if I got a vm running in VirtualBox and I start a vm in VMware, then my CPU load goes sky high and the server freezes in a matter of seconds.

The same problems exists vice versa as well:

I got a VMWare vm running with VirtualBox shut down.
As soon as I start a VirtualBox vm, the cpu load goes sky high with a server crash as a result.

Thus, both products work without any problem as long as they are not running at the same time.
Anybody experienced a similar problem and knows how to solve this?

I tried using VirtualBox 2.2.4 and recently also tried 3.0.0
My VMware Server version is 1.0.7
The server has 12GB of memory and 2 Quad Core Xeon 2.3Ghz CPUs

Thanks in advance.

[Perryg]

While the two can exist on the same x64 machine it would be a very bad idea to run them at the same time, and usually they will not work together causing the lockup you are experiencing.
You can run x32 virtualizers like this sometimes but I have not been successful testing the x64 versions.
The best suggestion I can give you is if you are having problems with the VMware program you should consider moving the VMs to VirtualBox.

[Sasquatch]

There are people who managed to get both a VB and VMW VM running at the same time. However, this can only be done when using software virtualization. As soon as one of them uses hardware virtualization, i.e. VT-x, then you have to stop one product before you can start the other.