Has anyone done performance tests with different versions of VirtualBox? I often see entries in the changelog relating to "significantly improved performance".
I did a test for VMWare player verses Virtualbox and its no competition, VMWare is hands down a lot faster especially on anything GUI. I like what Virtualbox gives us but the performance is a problem.
I noticed the same thing. VMWare (at least in my experience) runs a GUI in Unity mode at pretty much the same speed as native for xubuntu guests. I/O performance over shared folders is really good in VMWare too.
The only problem is VMWare has abandoned Linux guests in Unity mode for newer releases of VMWare, which likely means you'll be stuck on 7.x and running older guest versions until the end of time.
For me, VirtualBox's deal breakers are:
- VBox doesn't support dual monitors in seamless mode while VMWare does.
- VBox is not capable of running another 64bit OS inside of itself through virtualization, so using Vagrant inside of VBox is not happening. VMWare does not have this limitation.
VMware seems to have mostly abandoned Workstation. The team was fired. They even encourage you to no longer use their actually-working binary tools, instead telling you to use the often-broken-it-seems open source versions.
Fortunately for Windows hosts, the new Linux personality for NT might be good enough for dev work.
Still sucks for people that want to use VMs in a more serious way.
> VMware seems to have mostly abandoned Workstation.
There were just updates for Workstation[1] and Player[2] less than two months ago.
> The team was fired.
The team was replaced, and not simply to do only maintenance patches: "They’ve got a great surprise lined up for Q3, something very interesting for Q4, and something very big for H1."[3]
[N.B. I work for VMware, though not in End User Computing]
Can you give any insight on the future of Linux guests on Windows hosts using the free Player version?
I just want to be able to run xubuntu 16.x (and newer when it comes out) in Unity mode without issues but from what I read only 14.x works because none of the guest tooling has been updated.
It's a pity that this use case seems to have put on the back burner. This type of set up is the only way for a lot of people to work without resorting to buying 2 computers or dual booting.
> I just want to be able to run xubuntu 16.x (and newer when it comes out) in Unity mode
Apparently Workstation 12 removed Unity mode for Linux guests because it was rarely used[1] - I'm just speculating (I don't work in End User Computing) but I imagine that was based on Customer Experience Improvement Program (a.k.a. telemetry) data (I know some people prefer to opt-out of participating but the information is useful, we just implemented it in the product I work on and we're looking forward to being able to make better decisions about feature/bug priority based on it).
If you'd like to provide feedback on Unity support for Linux you might want to tweet to the Workstation team @vmw_workstation (and/or perhaps their PM, @mikeroysoft).
> I'm asking if the free Player version is going to get continued to be updated so it supports modern Linux guests
Your original question (and my response) seemed to ask specifically about Unity with regards to Linux. As for more general support of new/future Linux versions my assumption would be that will continue (but that's just my guess as a random engineer in a completely unrelated business unit, you may want to reach out to the Workstation team via Twitter/Facebook/forum for an informed and official answer).
This 7 year old comment disturbs me: "A lot of work for questionable usefulness. Definitely very low on our priority list.".
This looks like a clear case where the people developing the product don't actually use it in real life. As a developer and ops person I would say this is very likely the highest priority thing right now because it makes their product unusable for anyone who needs to spin up a VM within their Linux based dev VM.
I agree on the speed, VMWare has performed faster, at least for me. I like the price of VirtualBox, its size, and easy install. VMWare seems to install more things (it is heavier).
Anyone tested to see if the network and disk IO is actually any faster than before? We found it _very_ slow in the past compared to VMWare Fusion on OSX.
I'm not sure why, but my Ubuntu image with unity always thinks it should run at 10fps. I had to hard set the frame rate in compizConfig at 60 fps to get it to run smoothly.
Putting it here because it took me quite a while to figure out why it was 3D accelerated but still so slow.
Not sure if it is related (could be a Cinnamon problem) but when I run the Cinnamon desktop environment in a VirtualBox VM it says it is using software rendering.
Changing the pointing device from default touch mode to PS/2 mouse in Machine>Settings>System fixed that for me. Seems to be the default for Ubuntu machines in recent versions.
There's an open PR to add 5.1 support, and it seems to just be a bit-for-bit identical copy of the 5.0 code which Vagrant inexplicably requires a separate driver for: https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/pull/7574
All the heavy-duty OOP-first power of Ruby at their fingertips, and people still just copy-and-paste massive files to change a version string...
I only looked very briefly, but yes in this case 5.1 driver hasn't made any changes other than the version. But doing a quick vimdiff with a few of the other drivers show that the files have seen some substantial changes over time, and in some cases the small differences between two versions of a driver are to work around bugs, whether new or newly identified.
With Oracle's rocky reputation around open source, I'm surprised that VirutalBox is still going strong and under active development. There doesn't seem to be any kind of commercial "enterprise version" that they license for big bucks... what is their incentive for keeping this thing going?
This isn't completely true. You can use it for free commercially as long as you install it yourself. The Licensing FAQ [1] says:
> Also, if you install it on your work PC at some large company, this is still personal use. However, if you are an administrator and want to deploy it to the 500 desktops in your company, this would no longer qualify as personal use.
It's also made even uglier by the fact that VMware has discontinued Fusion, and Parallels (at least in the Vagrant, etc, ecosystem) has always been a second class citizen).
Not to mention that Parallels licensing is a pain. I understand license key activation as at times a necessary evil but in cases where you are developing a product for use primarily by developers who may frequently re-install their computer, could you at least do some form of trivial hardware checksumming? I had to call support because I'd exceeded five activations of my license. They reset it, after asking why. Several months later, same situation - this time they refused to reset the activation counter. Once loyal customer, no longer, when you refuse to activate software for the purchaser.
Thankfully, Docker et al seem to be making some good strides at making use of Hyve based virtualization in the OS X realm. I'm excited to see how that progresses.
The development team is not in India and is doing more than bare-minimum maintenance, they have "a great surprise lined up for Q3, something very interesting for Q4, and something very big for H1"[1]
Veertu exists now - it's in the app store, and uses Apple's Hypervisor.framework (just like Docker for Mac). I purchased it because having Apple supply the in-kernel virtualization component strikes me at the Right Thing (tm). Veertu runs a 2D Windows desktop fine, but it does seem slower - I guess they haven't matured a full stack of accelerated virtual graphics drivers etc.
> It's also made even uglier by the fact that VMware has discontinued Fusion
It doesn't look like Fusion has been discontinued. [1]
"The Fusion and Workstation teams are having a very busy year. Since we shipped Fusion 8 and Workstation 12 almost a year ago, we’ve been busy adding new skills to the development teams so that we can take the products in a new and compelling direction. Added to that, the team has released several updates that you really should be loading on to your systems – they make the products better in a bunch of ways that are described here, here and here."
My understanding is they gutted the entire fusion and workstation teams (firing all US employees), and shipped it over to China for long-term maintenance. That blog post kind of confirms it... the core team working on ESX is in the US, the "Hosted-UI" - fusion and workstation teams - all appear to be Chinese. To say that the core ESX components are the base and the Hosted-UI team just puts a UI on top seems preposterous to me. If that's the case I would expect a lockstep release of all the products, and the same feature functionality if all they're doing is adding a GUI. That's simply not the case.
I don't see any security-related fixes. Is VBox that solid or am I missing something? I remember also looking at previous versions and not finding much...
"VMM: many more fixes", "GUI: various bugfixes and internal cleanup", "Audio: various bugfixes and infrastructure improvements" - who know what that means. If nobody disclosed it externally as a vulnerability, they could just call things "bugfixes".
"... better support for Python 3". Why does VB need to better support a specific executable, namely python 3? Anyone have more technical details on this?
VirtualBox supports scripting using python; for that, it provides a python module. Just like any other python library, it needs to specifically support py3 syntax, or errors may happen.
OK, Python for using their VM's API. Yes, that rings a bell. However, from the notes it seemed like something they modified in the VM to better support python with the guest OS ... did not make sense until. Thanks!
There's some negativity around this product on this thread, but honestly I'm really glad Virtual Box is around and under active development.
I have both an active linux and os x env for dev and I use virtual box to manage and switch between. It's been super useful, very reliable, fast enough, and, btw, it's free.
Do you just have a vanilla OSX VM installation or do you optimize it in some way? For me OSX is very slow on vbox on a very decently spec'ed VM. Far from my experience with Windows guests.
My understanding is that on Windows, VirtualBox still can't run along Docker For Windows, because DFW needs Hyper-V and VBox is incompatible. Is this still the case? I don't ask much of my VMs, but desktop Ubuntu guests under Hyper-V are very clunky.
IIRC that is not something that VirtualBox can fix; I read somewhere that Hyper-V requires exclusive use of the virtualisation features of the hardware.
Note that this only applies to 64-bit virtualisation, you can still run Hyper-V and 32-bit VirtualBox virtual machines simultaneously.
64 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 84.5 ms ] threadThe only problem is VMWare has abandoned Linux guests in Unity mode for newer releases of VMWare, which likely means you'll be stuck on 7.x and running older guest versions until the end of time.
For me, VirtualBox's deal breakers are:
- VBox doesn't support dual monitors in seamless mode while VMWare does.
- VBox is not capable of running another 64bit OS inside of itself through virtualization, so using Vagrant inside of VBox is not happening. VMWare does not have this limitation.
Fortunately for Windows hosts, the new Linux personality for NT might be good enough for dev work.
Still sucks for people that want to use VMs in a more serious way.
There were just updates for Workstation[1] and Player[2] less than two months ago.
> The team was fired.
The team was replaced, and not simply to do only maintenance patches: "They’ve got a great surprise lined up for Q3, something very interesting for Q4, and something very big for H1."[3]
[N.B. I work for VMware, though not in End User Computing]
[1] http://pubs.vmware.com/Release_Notes/en/workstation/11/works...
[2] http://pubs.vmware.com/Release_Notes/en/player/7/player-714-...
[3] http://blogs.vmware.com/workstation/2016/07/meet-the-team.ht...
I just want to be able to run xubuntu 16.x (and newer when it comes out) in Unity mode without issues but from what I read only 14.x works because none of the guest tooling has been updated.
It's a pity that this use case seems to have put on the back burner. This type of set up is the only way for a lot of people to work without resorting to buying 2 computers or dual booting.
Apparently Workstation 12 removed Unity mode for Linux guests because it was rarely used[1] - I'm just speculating (I don't work in End User Computing) but I imagine that was based on Customer Experience Improvement Program (a.k.a. telemetry) data (I know some people prefer to opt-out of participating but the information is useful, we just implemented it in the product I work on and we're looking forward to being able to make better decisions about feature/bug priority based on it).
If you'd like to provide feedback on Unity support for Linux you might want to tweet to the Workstation team @vmw_workstation (and/or perhaps their PM, @mikeroysoft).
[1] https://communities.vmware.com/thread/518735
Not really (also, post-7 Player has been re-branded "Workstation Player"[1], presumably so the relationship to Workstation is clearer).
[1] https://www.vmware.com/products/player
(Not trolling you either, this conversation is just a side effect of your company's naming conventions haha)
Basically I'm asking if the free Player version is going to get continued to be updated so it supports modern Linux guests?
Your original question (and my response) seemed to ask specifically about Unity with regards to Linux. As for more general support of new/future Linux versions my assumption would be that will continue (but that's just my guess as a random engineer in a completely unrelated business unit, you may want to reach out to the Workstation team via Twitter/Facebook/forum for an informed and official answer).
That's a weird turn of phrase. Are they still working there or not?
https://blog.chipx86.com/2016/01/26/a-tribute-to-vmware-work...
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/vmware...
This looks like a clear case where the people developing the product don't actually use it in real life. As a developer and ops person I would say this is very likely the highest priority thing right now because it makes their product unusable for anyone who needs to spin up a VM within their Linux based dev VM.
Putting it here because it took me quite a while to figure out why it was 3D accelerated but still so slow.
The funny thing is that VB complains about this configuration whenever you load the console.
Have you tried increasing the video memory for the VM or enabling acceleration?
All the heavy-duty OOP-first power of Ruby at their fingertips, and people still just copy-and-paste massive files to change a version string...
> Also, if you install it on your work PC at some large company, this is still personal use. However, if you are an administrator and want to deploy it to the 500 desktops in your company, this would no longer qualify as personal use.
[1] https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ
Not to mention that Parallels licensing is a pain. I understand license key activation as at times a necessary evil but in cases where you are developing a product for use primarily by developers who may frequently re-install their computer, could you at least do some form of trivial hardware checksumming? I had to call support because I'd exceeded five activations of my license. They reset it, after asking why. Several months later, same situation - this time they refused to reset the activation counter. Once loyal customer, no longer, when you refuse to activate software for the purchaser.
Thankfully, Docker et al seem to be making some good strides at making use of Hyve based virtualization in the OS X realm. I'm excited to see how that progresses.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/27/vmware_fusion_and_wo...
Agree about Docker using built-in macOS virtualization. Quite hopeful.
Development switched to different people/teams but that doesn't mean it's not under active development. Meet the new team: http://blogs.vmware.com/workstation/2016/07/meet-the-team.ht...
The development team is not in India and is doing more than bare-minimum maintenance, they have "a great surprise lined up for Q3, something very interesting for Q4, and something very big for H1"[1]
[1] http://blogs.vmware.com/workstation/2016/07/meet-the-team.ht...
It doesn't look like Fusion has been discontinued. [1]
"The Fusion and Workstation teams are having a very busy year. Since we shipped Fusion 8 and Workstation 12 almost a year ago, we’ve been busy adding new skills to the development teams so that we can take the products in a new and compelling direction. Added to that, the team has released several updates that you really should be loading on to your systems – they make the products better in a bunch of ways that are described here, here and here."
[1] http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2016/07/meet-the-team.htm...
As I commented elsewhere[1] (and in more detail) in this thread Fusion/Workstation is not discontinued/abandoned.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12085845
But it's not like they don't get any security issues at all: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=virtualbox
https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/14367
I have both an active linux and os x env for dev and I use virtual box to manage and switch between. It's been super useful, very reliable, fast enough, and, btw, it's free.
Note that this only applies to 64-bit virtualisation, you can still run Hyper-V and 32-bit VirtualBox virtual machines simultaneously.