Hey Everyone, Out of VMware, VirtualBox, Xen, OpenVZ, and KVM, which virtualization technology do you prefer and why? No right or wrong answer here! Just looking for some perspective on the subject. (^_^);
I myself have used VMWare and VirtualBox. And pretty much threw VirtualBox into the trash quickly, sticking to VMWare, there's just too many features I miss at VirtualBox. But to be fair, there is one situation where I (have to) use VirtualBox: I have a server that's behind a MAC filtering switch so to have VMs using a bridged NIC, the NIC of the VM needs to have the same MAC address as the physical NIC of the host. On VMWare this works for one single VM, but not for multiple (VMWare starts nagging around and disabling network for those VMs). On VirtualBox I can run multiple VMs with the same MAC address and everythings just works fine.
I use VirtualBox, I've used Parallels, VMWare, and Xen, but I have found VirtualBox to work best for my particular needs . . . the fact that you don't have to pay for it is amazingly nice . . . -Disjaukifa
I've been using virtualization tools for years, and in my opinion VMWare is the best choice for Windows guest systems, while Virtualbox has far better compatibility with Linux guests (even 3D acceleration works great). Qemu is a good and highly compatible virtualization app too (in fact Virtualbox is largely based on Qemu), but it's not so easy to put it to work. I haven't tried Xen yet, but from what I know it's better suited for VPS servers.
VirtualBox OSE runs pretty fine (maybe better than VMWare), but if you need a legacy os like Win 95/98, VMWare has better support.
Yes, VMWare does seem to have better support for MS software. The biggest thing I miss from VMWare is drag and dropping into VM's. Under VirtualBox it's all done via shares. I personally prefer VirtualBox because it's free and it supports Linux better.
I use VirtualBox. I haven't found anything (free) that supports USB devices as well. (I use it mainly for flashing my phone, Lego mindstorms, etc. that don't support Windows 7 and/or x64.)
Love VMWare for the ease of use and high compatibility. Got WindowsXP, Linux (Ubuntu), Minix3 and MacOSX running in virtual machines without a hassle!
