virtualbox.org

Hi Folks!

I love VirtualBox, been using it since 1.6.2. I just upgraded to 1.6.6 a few days ago (right before 2.0.0 came out) so the minute I saw 2.0.0, I upgraded immidiately.

The problem I'm having, which seemed to work good under 1.6.2 and 1.6.4, was that when I start a vm with "VBoxHeadless -s Name -p7000 &" the performance is terrible, completely unusable.

My host is Slamd64 (64bit version of Slackware) and I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 and other Linux guests. Another of my guests is CentOs 5.2 but I haven't tried VRDP with that yet. I figured VRDP was a feature of VirtualBox itself and should not matter on which guest OS I'm running.

Anyone else having this issue?

FredR wrote:I figured VRDP was a feature of VirtualBox itself and should not matter on which guest OS I'm running.

Yes, VRDP is host-side functionality. Do you notice the equivalent hit if you are running using the normal GUI or is it just RDP?

If you can't live with and you don't need the extra functionality then I suggest you downgrade to 1.6.6, but see the FAQ caveat on this.

Can you show me a link to the caveat in the FAQ?

In the meantime, I've worked around this by using the remote access available in the guest OS. One factor I forgot to mention, I am using host interface bridged networking, so it's not as an immidiate need as if I were using NAT.

In fact, I'm a big fan of virtualization appearing to be transparent, with the guest vm's showing as separate hosts on the network.

Thanks for the info!

See my signature for the VirtualBox FAQ link. Oh, there it is too .

Ok, I just tried it again in the GUI (not using VBoxHeadless) with my Ubuntu 8.04 guest machine, and it does have the 2.0.0 guest additions.

Still getting the same effect as before, but to be more precise, it has something to do with refreshing the screen. In other words, it will draw the screen once but "ghosts" of previous screen drawings will stay. In other words, I load up firefox, and a google homepage appears. I quit firefox, and the ghost of the page stays. I open a menu, it appears over the ghost of the google page.

It's not terribly unusable (perhaps I used strong words earlier) but it is a bit of an oddity. It definitely has to do with the screen redrawing. To be fair, I've tried with several RDP clients (those included in KDE 3.5 on Linux and the RDP client in WinXP Pro SP3). I always get the same effect, definitely reproducible.