IT

Virtualbox

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 
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    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]

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