virtualbox.org

I need to find corporate, business, and/or academic sites who are currently using VB to support virtualized server applications. Internally at my school I've demonstated how VB can support multiple servers (these are relatively small applications) on a single physical PC. Problem is: my boss is reluctant to procede unless I can demonstrate that VB is more than just a desktop tool and/or a hobbyist's interest. So: I need the names of real businesses, and schools and colleges would be even better, which are using VB to run production servers. Anybody out there? I'd be happy to post a base user list of what comes back, if anybody has the time to reply. Thanks in advance.
=-
michael davis
belmont university

VirtualBox was not that stable in earlier releases. I would be very careful to use it in production. VMware is more stable than VB.


UPDATE: I have read through this and want to rephrase. I do not mean that VirtualBox is unstable. If it works, it works very well.

What I meant was that new versions of VB can break things, and that is a problem. A stable version works fine. A new upgrade might break things. But if you have a stable VB version, then it is stable. Be careful when upgrading to a new version though. Test the new version well before upgrading.

no way i'd use virtualbox for production servers, especially when oracle could pull the plug at any time.

there's way too much of an overhead for a start. you want openvz, kvm, or maybe xen.

i've given up on vmware, its gone too windows-centric and they seem to concentrate too much on all the extra tools you can buy these days, rather than the core product.

virtualbox is ok for desktop/development work.

VirtualBox is the hypervisor backend of Oracle's VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). See http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/165180

Our product is used by small, big and huge corporations, schools and universities. I will not give you names as such information is confidential. Contact Oracle if you want references. There are mostly end users on this forum and some have rather strong opinions.

I find it odd that the only people that commented on this are volunteers who are supporting the product and do so in a negative manor.

I wonder have you tried this in a corporate environment or just speculating that it would be a disaster?

For myself I have used, suggested, and even installed VirtualBox (or shall I say showed them how so they could do it to keep in tune with licensing), and find it performs to my and the clients specifications. Used as intended it can be a powerful tool.

well with the VDI stuff it becomes more enterprisey and manageable, but its still targeted at desktops not servers.

sej7278 wrote:well with the VDI stuff it becomes more enterprisey and manageable, but its still targeted at desktops not servers.

Is that your opinion or have you actually tried to use it as a server virtualizer and failed?

VirtualBox is perfectly suitable for server usage and we have customers using it as such. Even this forum is run inside a VBox VM. Not that this is the best example of a heavy-duty server load, but still. Too bad one of the leading VM benchmarks for server loads doesn't allow us to publish results. You'd be surprised how well we manage against the competition.

Exactly, I've build complete data centers with it, there are no reasons not to use it, its reliable as long as you use the Host as baremetal as possible with proper hardware.

sandervl wrote:

sej7278 wrote:well with the VDI stuff it becomes more enterprisey and manageable, but its still targeted at desktops not servers.

Is that your opinion or have you actually tried to use it as a server virtualizer and failed?

its my opinion and oracle's i guess - virtual "desktop" infrastructure and all that.

its just not very bare metal is it. i guess if you use it headless on a minimised linux build, but it will never come close to openvz/virtuozzo/containers/zones/jails for performance and low use of resources.

i can see it beating various vmware products (you can even tell its faster than server/workstation/fusion by just looking at it) but is it up to competing with xen/kvm/esx/hyperv?

i'm a big fan of virtualbox don't get me wrong, but building datacentres with it?! i guess if you're a windoze shop you've got to have the gui overhead anyway, and its gotta be better than virtualpc.

plus with the way oracle is going lately, you've got to think twice before using java/solaris/virtualbox/mysql in any project.

and what kind of support is available - there's plenty of posts on here about not even being able to purchase virtualbox; phb's won't buy a product without support.

sej7278 wrote:i'm a big fan of virtualbox don't get me wrong, but building datacentres with it?! i guess if you're a windoze shop you've got to have the gui overhead anyway, and its gotta be better than virtualpc.

What GUI overhead? have you seen all the projects for remote management? depending on the type of host you can manage all the memory and every bit of this 'overhead'. Have you ever seen what esx's overhead is with 100 servers and 150 desktops? The fact esx has buildin management and with vbox you need to arrange this yourself makes hardly a case against vbox in a server/hosting environment.

sej7278 wrote:plus with the way oracle is going lately, you've got to think twice before using java/solaris/virtualbox/mysql in any project.

I was little bit worried when Sun overtook innoteck, but when Oracle overtook Sun made my worries much stronger. Oracle will dismiss all the products that will not make a profit. I don't see this a something bad from business point of view, but it can hurt your previous decisions you made a while ago. It looks like Oracle will be much more active "protecting" its software: OpenSolaris will be most probably killed, with Java you can get a lawsuit, MySQL a lot of former developers has left the company and created a new project. I am little bit afraid that Oracle will just dismiss open source version of VirtualBox and use VDI for customers - you know just like Solaris/OpenSolaris, you can buy Solaris, but for OpenSolaris: no profit no use.

My humble opinion is now days using open source software: It is not the strongest point of having the best software for any solution (e.g. virtualization), but how fast can you migrate to other competitive product if some "strange" (read: non-friendly) decision is made by management. Can you easily migrate? Is product supporting standards - is industry standardized to support it? I know there is OVF, but have you tried using it? I have (two weeks ago) and I can say: disaster. Multiple problems all over.

abcuser wrote:My humble opinion is now days using open source software: It is not the strongest point of having the best software for any solution (e.g. virtualization), but how fast can you migrate to other competitive product if some "strange" (read: non-friendly) decision is made by management. Can you easily migrate? Is product supporting standards - is industry standardized to support it? I know there is OVF, but have you tried using it? I have (two weeks ago) and I can say: disaster. Multiple problems all over.

not sure i understand you there. one of the best reasons to use open source software is that if anyone tries to close it down or start charging for it, you can fork it, you can fix bugs yourself, and you can migrate to something else as the standards are all open too.

i'm having a lot of problems at work at the moment with closed source software, which i'm sure i'd be able to fix in a couple of hours if i had access to the source, but the company selling the two products in question just don't seem to have any interest in fixing them - probably as they've fired all of the good developers. how they can have the cheek to sell products and charge real $$$ for support and then not fix bugs reported by users is beyond me.

sun were always very keen on semi-open software like java, virtualbox (puel), solaris (printer drivers etc), staroffice (database parts), mysql (innodb) etc; and it ain't gonna change with oracle, but it might be unfair to discuss that on their forums

I use VirtualBox at work at RIT. It is very slim and is easy to work with, even when on a headless server. I have a friend as JP Morgan Stanley and I was told they use VDI there. So there are both large and small companies using it. VB has 2 main positives over kvm at the moment. It works on older hardware rather well. With KVM, you HAVE to have vt-x or the amd equivalent. VB is also much more feature complete. The last time I tried kvm (Fedora 13) there wasn't even an option for bridged networking out of the box. You would think that would be the first networking option they would have finished. But kvm is coming along nicely. I just wish the tools in Fedora / RHEL would start supporting both hypervisors as is the plan the future.

sej7278 wrote:its just not very bare metal is it. i guess if you use it headless on a minimised linux build, but it will never come close to openvz/virtuozzo/containers/zones/jails for performance and low use of resources.

And none of these are hypervisors, now are they? Don't compare apples and oranges.

sej7278 wrote:i can see it beating various vmware products (you can even tell its faster than server/workstation/fusion by just looking at it) but is it up to competing with xen/kvm/esx/hyperv?

It is.

sej7278 wrote: i'm a big fan of virtualbox don't get me wrong, but building datacentres with it?! i guess if you're a windoze shop you've got to have the gui overhead anyway, and its gotta be better than virtualpc.

VBoxHeadless. Do you honestly think a VDI server running 50 VMs is running 50 copies of our Qt GUI?

sej7278 wrote:plus with the way oracle is going lately, you've got to think twice before using java/solaris/virtualbox/mysql in any project.

VirtualBox is open-source and the closed source components can be easily replaced. That protects people from stupidity of large companies if you're
really worried about that.

24/7 On big Iron, major company. It has proven itself stable and reliable, with excellent performance. Additionally it is more robust in many areas of it's functionality than VMware and KVM (EG: The VBox API, and VRDP). It is currently used for development, functional testing and in the datacenter. Additionally it is being considered for use in some of our products.

The attached zip file contains VBox log files from a myriad of the systems we use VirtualBox on.