virtualbox.org

Hi:

I need to make Windows 7 Ent. x86 and x64 reference images for my production environment. How do you compre Virtualbox 4.0.4 with VMWare Server 2.0, VMWare Player, and MS Virtual Server?

There's no point, VBox is superior

vanmost wrote:Hi:

I need to make Windows 7 Ent. x86 and x64 reference images for my production environment. How do you compre Virtualbox 4.0.4 with VMWare Server 2.0, VMWare Player, and MS Virtual Server?

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to do exactly, but:

- Don't know anything about MS - they're the enemy.

- VMWare Server was an enterprise level thing, as such you'll have to RDP to every machine you build. I say was because it's old, you want to be looking at ESXi now if you want enterprise, and the free ESXi doesn't give you much in the way of enterprise features. No high availability things like that. Either way these things are meant to be running in some data center far away and you RDP (SSH, VNC) to your VMs. With the actual VMServer you can install it right on your box but you still have to RDP to your VMs. ESXi is bare metal you install it as the host "OS" at which point you can't use that machine for anything other than hosting VMs. VBox can do a reasonable impression of the free ESXi or VMServer with the web client. You will need a Windows machine for ESXi to run vSphere - that's the client to create, start, stop VMs all that jazz. If you pay VMWare untold amounts of money you'll be able to put several hosts in a cluster and move VMs from one host to another without stopping the VM from that same client, VBox won't do that for you.

- VMPlayer and VBox are both desktop client oriented environments and both are very easy to use. In each case you get a GUI where you click "New" make your machine, click "Start" to start it and you get a window with your machine. Very simple. VBox supports snapshots and a web client (separate). VMPlayer has drag and drop. I personally feel VBox beats VMPlayer feature wise, really other than drag and drop the player is completely barren. If you'd like a more professional product from VMWare look at Workstation.

I develop applications and I have several VMs to test stuff in for development, builds and deployment. I used VMPlayer, VMWorkstation and VBox on my actual desktop, I always come back to VBox as I feel (other than drag and drop) has just the perfect feature set where it's both very easy to use and feels featured. That and the fact that VMWare seems to have completely abandoned the Linux crowd. I also have other VMs for same type of purposes on an ESXi machine in our company's data center, the choice there wasn't so much upto me rather than my sysadmin, but it has been serving us fine for now.

The current enterprise solution from Microsoft is Hyper-V. Virtual Server is effectively dead.

levk wrote:and move VMs from one host to another without stopping the VM from that same client, VBox won't do that for you.

Yes it does and it works very well.

vbox4me2 wrote:

levk wrote:and move VMs from one host to another without stopping the VM from that same client, VBox won't do that for you.

Yes it does and it works very well.

Wow I didn't know this, weird choice to name it "teleporting"