Real World Computing
Up in the clouds
There are numerous potential uses for virtualisation products like this. For example, if you're a web developer and you need to check your pages on different versions of Internet Explorer, you can create multiple virtual machines, each running a different version of IE. If, like me, you develop on a Mac but need to then test software on Windows then, again, you can create a virtual Windows machine to do the job. If you're a Windows user but you want to experiment with Linux... that's no problem either. And on, and on, and on. VirtualBox supports guest operating systems including Solaris, many different versions of Linux, and Windows from 3.1 all the way to Vista.
While earlier versions of VirtualBox worked relatively well overall, there's no denying that there were some rough edges, but the new release of the software has transformed VirtualBox into a really polished product. We tested the Mac OS X version, and installed both Windows XP and Solaris guest operating systems on it with absolutely no problems at all. We compared the Windows guest OS with a VMware Fusion installation we had on the same machine, and although we didn't do any serious benchmarks, the VirtualBox version felt just as responsive and was certainly more than good enough to use for our purposes.
VirtualBox was initially developed by a German company named Innotek, but in February it was purchased by Sun. This is just one in a long line of acquisitions by Sun - including, of course, MySQL - as the company moves more and more into the open-source arena. The company is positioning the acquisition as being complementary to its XVM Server, a high-end virtualisation environment aimed at datacenters, and as a tool for developers that works well with other Sun products such as OpenSolaris, the open source version of its extremely highly-regarded operating system. Whatever its reasons for the acquisition, though, it's good news for those of us who use virtualisation software on a daily basis; with Sun's technical and financial muscle behind it, VirtualBox is only going to get better and better.
