virtualbox.org

Hi,

We are planning to use Virtual Box in a production environment since our current virtualization platform VMware Server 2.02 are at its end of life. Since Virtual Box supports VMDK disks, we would like to create our vm's using VMware Player instead and then use Virtual Box to play it. This approach would allow us to use VMware as well as Virtual Box. Is there any significant performance improvement or additional features when using VDI in Virtual Box instead of VMDK?

Thanks.

VDI is better for VirtualBox, but the benefits are probably not significant (some features such as disk resize are not supported for vmdk).

Of greater concern is your assumption that a VMWare VM will run happily in VirtualBox, just because the file format is supported - that's like assuming that Windows can run all Linux apps, just because Windows can read data CDs created on Linux. In fact the VMWare GAs would be incompatible, and you'd have to pay careful attention to the hardware recipes - it has to be available on both platforms. You also don't mention a guest OS - activation would be an issue with Windows guests.