Downloads

I've been on the virtual machine bandwagon for a few years now. Installing and testing programs inside a VM keeps my work PC's OS installation safe, and I don't have to constantly run over to my test bed to check things. How I managed to miss VirtualBox, which Sun recently aquired from Innotek, is a mystery to me. However, I'm glad I finally found it. VirtualBox is more capable than Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007 in most respects and a bit friendlier than VMware's free VMware Player and VMware Server--though it proved a hair glitchy with removable media and peripherals at times.

By more capable than VPC 2007, I mean that VirtualBox supports operating systems other than Microsoft's,as well as USB and SATA, which VPC 2007 does not.. The latter two features are part of closed source editions, but there's an open source edition of VirtualBox for developers that's also free for the download.

As to more friendly, I found the VirtualBox tabbed startup/control dialog easier to intuit than VMWare's, and when minimized, VirtualBox's VM icon is different from the VirtualBox control panel. Virtual PC 2007's are identical, and I'm forever wasting time clicking on the wrong one. On the other hand, with Virtual PC 2007 you can drag virtually anything between the host OS and guest OS (the one you're running as a VM)--an extremely handy feature--while VirtualBox only allows cut and paste of text.

One thing it took me a while to hunt down was any type of Save/Load function. You must invoke VirtualBox's Virtual Disk Manager then "add" a new drive, which is a bit unintuitive in my book. But the kicker is, you can open existing VMWare machines with VirtualBox. Hence, though at first blush it might appear that it has little communal support, you have access to a whole host of guests (saved VMs), so to speak.

Other than the weak cut-and-paste with the Windows version (there are Linux and Mac versions of VirtualBox that I've yet to try), my only minor complaint about Virtual Box is the USB support, which in my hands-on was a bit iffier than VMWare's. It took me several tries to get some devices to work, and instead of the little host-OS-system-tray-tooltip-bubble you get with VMWare, you get the full-blown "Add New Hardware" wizard with multiple dialogs you must step through. I also received one or two error messages within the guest OS window (XP SP2 in this case) though after a couple of restarts, everything worked okay and continued that way.

VirtualBox is tough competition for Virtual PC 2007 and VMWare. It's free, fast and supports every OS I want to install (you can even attach images of boot discs like Acronis True Image or R-Drive Image and boot from them). It seems stable enough so far, and in my book it's definitely a keeper.

Note: This link takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

--Jon L. Jacobi