Virtualbox Pro & Con

After played around with Xen and KMV I’ve finally decided to go for VirtualBox. Please find the pros and cons considered from below:

Pro

• Available for all major platforms (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, Solaris, …)
• Easy to install (no special kernel required, compared to Xen)
• Easy to manage (Qt GUI, CLI, API, libvirt support)
• Paravirtualization (virtio) for network and memory (baloon)
• Active developed, frequently new releases
• Good end-user documentation

Con

• No paravirtualization (virtio) for storage (virtio-blk)
• Direct access for block devices is not supported
• Proprietary license for USB and RDP support

Command Line Recipes

VirtualBox comes with a friendly Qt based GUI, but also with a set of command line tools. This makes it very powerful for headless usage. A couple of handy recipes can be found from below:

• Take a screenshot

  1 2	VBoxManage controlvm <uuid>|<name> \ screenshotpng <filename.png>

  VBoxManage controlvm <uuid>|<name> \ screenshotpng <filename.png>

• Set a specific machine time in past at startup

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  #!/bin/bash VBoxManage modifyvm <uuid>|<name> \ --biossystemtimeoffset \ $[($(date -d '2008-03-05 00:30:00' +%s) \ -$(date +%s))*1000]

  #!/bin/bash VBoxManage modifyvm <uuid>|<name> \ --biossystemtimeoffset \ $[($(date -d '2008-03-05 00:30:00' +%s) \ -$(date +%s))*1000]

• Activate RDP

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  vbm="Debian64" # Virtual Machine Name oder UUID VBoxManage modifyvm $vbm \ --vrde on \ --vrdeport 3389 \ --vrdeauthtype null \ --vrdemulticon on

  vbm="Debian64" # Virtual Machine Name oder UUID VBoxManage modifyvm $vbm \ --vrde on \ --vrdeport 3389 \ --vrdeauthtype null \ --vrdemulticon on