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VirtualBox Vs VMWare Fusion and Parallels??
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Forum Regular
Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: Ireland
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Hey,
How do people find VirtualBox ( http://www.virtualbox.org/) compared to VMWare Fusion and Parallels?
The only threads I could find were from July or earlier and much may have changed since then 
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sheesh, that took 8 hours for me to be asked to change my sig...
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Mar 2002
Location: Boston
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Why not see for yourself, I believe both VMWare and Parallels offer 30 day trials. While I have not used/tried VirtualBox. I found Fusion to be excellent. Stability, performance, technical support. all of which I had heard complaints about regarding Parallels. I cannot speak for virtualbox, but you'll want have some good forums/support structures in case things don't go smoothly. I have that in Parallels. just my $.02
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~Mike
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Houston, TX
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Not quite there yet, even for the full version; the free version lacks basic things like USB support.
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Dec 1999
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Originally Posted by mduell 
Not quite there yet, even for the full version; the free version lacks basic things like USB support.
Stop spewing falsehoods. I just mounted a USB Flash drive in Ubuntu 8.10 under Virtual Box 2.0.2 in my MacBook 2GHz/2GB RAM/Leopard.
VirtualBox is top quality software IMO. And it is much better documented than Parallels and Fusion.
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Addicted to MacNN
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VirtualBox is pretty great, all things considered. The major downside to it (IMO) is its lack of portable virtual machines. With VMWare, you can stick an entire VM on a flash drive and load it up elsewhere. VirtualBox creates unique IDs that tie the VM to the VirtualBox installation it's used with, rendering the VMs non-portable. I think there are workarounds, but I didn't have a lot of success with them.
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Sell or send me your vintage Mac things if you don't want them.
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Houston, TX
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Originally Posted by The Godfather
Stop spewing falsehoods. I just mounted a USB Flash drive in Ubuntu 8.10 under Virtual Box 2.0.2 in my MacBook 2GHz/2GB RAM/Leopard.
VirtualBox is top quality software IMO. And it is much better documented than Parallels and Fusion.
Stop spewing and start reading the documentation you just praised.
Originally Posted by http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions
The following list shows the enterprise features that are only present in the closed-source edition.
* USB support
VirtualBox implements a virtual USB controller and supports passing through USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 devices to virtual machines.
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Forum Regular
Join Date: Jul 2002
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thanks for the replies guys! I guess I'll take VirtualBox for a spin before putting down cash for VMWare Fusion.
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sheesh, that took 8 hours for me to be asked to change my sig...
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Aug 2006
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Originally Posted by mduell
Stop spewing and start reading the documentation you just praised.
Yes, the closed-source edition has USB support. The closed-source edition is also free for personal use. You only start paying licensing if you want to get support from Sun for the software (or use it commercially).
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Sell or send me your vintage Mac things if you don't want them.
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Mac Enthusiast
Join Date: Feb 2006
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Yeah, I use VirtualBox with USB keyboard/mouse/flash drives - works just fine.
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Forum Regular
Join Date: Jul 2002
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Ok I've been trying Virtual Box and it is mostly very good for my needs. USB does work on the closed source version but is a little flaky compared to VMWare Fusion. I was trying flash a mobile phone's firmware but VirtualBox had some problems grabbing hold of the USB interface. The trial VMWare Fusion worked great to flash my phone. Other than that VirtualBox seems to perform very well.
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sheesh, that took 8 hours for me to be asked to change my sig...
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Oct 2005
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Originally Posted by shifuimam
Yes, the closed-source edition has USB support. The closed-source edition is also free for personal use. You only start paying licensing if you want to get support from Sun for the software (or use it commercially).
Sorry, I should have capitalized Free.
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Addicted to MacNN
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Originally Posted by shifuimam
With VMWare, you can stick an entire VM on a flash drive and load it up elsewhere.
That's really nice to know. I have a slightly related question about it, after installing XP Home (I don't need anything over that) my VMware Virtual Machine size was 1,8 GB, but after installing four minor apps -Safari, IE7, QT and winrar-, the VM size is 3,84 GB which is way bigger than I would like it to be… so I have no idea what is going… could it be some sort of dynamic space allocation like VPC had? 
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