Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.2 Nips At VMware’s Heels: Review

While VMware Workstation is the undisputed leader in desktop virtualisation, Oracle VM VirtualBox continues to nip at its heels, offering a personal-use version of the product at no cost, while stuffing in important virtual machine performance improvements.

The result is a bounty of choice for application developers, IT pros and power users who want to try out running multiple systems using a variety of operating systems in a locally controlled workstation.

Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.2

Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in January of this year. Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.2 is the first rebranded release of the technology, which was itself the product of Sun’s acquisition of innotek GmbH in February 2008. The family history is important—both as an indication of the value placed on the technology by its various owners and also as a way to understand the rather subdued pace of product development. IT managers who are considering Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.2 should keep an eye on the level of community interest as Oracle takes over product direction.

On the technical side of the equation, VirtualBox 3.2 has added support for Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5 (unsurprising) and experimental support for Mac OS X Server virtual machines (which is surprising.) I ran VirtualBox on a Lenovo W510 workstation, most notably equipped with an Intel Core i7 processor, which is now supported by VirtualBox 3.2. The virtualisation platform worked as expected with the physical processor hardware.

Extending processor support options, I was able to use the new CPU hot-plug feature to add compute power to some of the guest systems while they were running. CPU hot-add used with my Windows Server 2008 R2 Data Center edition VM worked without a problem. In Windows Server 2008, only hot-add is supported.

Adding and removing CPUs

In my CentOS 5.5 VM, I was able to hot-add and hot-remove CPUs. In all cases, adding and removing CPUs required me to use the VBoxManage command-line interface. Since this kind of CPU manipulation would likely be part of a broader load-management process, I think the command line is a fine place to make these types of adjustments, as it lends itself to a scripted operation.

This version of VirtualBox also added the ability to change the amount of RAM assigned to running 64-bit VMs. I was able to make changes to the way physical memory was allocated among my VMs that were running VirtualBox Guest Additions, which in my environment is part of my standard configuration.

As with CPU changes on the fly, memory ballooning—the rather fanciful term used by Oracle to describe this feature—is controlled from the command line. This type of memory management would be best used in a highly automated and dynamic data centre, where scripted control of this feature makes command-line access essential.