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>
- Set a specific machine time in past at startup
1 2 3 4 5
#!/bin/bash VBoxManage modifyvm <uuid>|<name> \ --biossystemtimeoffset \ $[($(date -d '2008-03-05 00:30:00' +%s) \ -$(date +%s))*1000]
- Activate RDP
1 2 3 4 5 6
vbm="Debian64" # Virtual Machine Name oder UUID VBoxManage modifyvm $vbm \ --vrde on \ --vrdeport 3389 \ --vrdeauthtype null \ --vrdemulticon on