Playing with VirtualBox
Now that virtualization becomes more and more important for a developer I decided to test VMware, VirtualBox and Xen. Today I'd like to report about VirtualBox, which is an open source virtualization solution by Sun Microsystems. It's available for Windows, Linux, MacOS X and OpenSolaris hosts and virtualizes x86 hardware for desktop, server and embedded use. After two days of testing I've got 3 virtual machines running Arch Linux, FreeBSD and Windows XP. Setting up a box is really easy.. You select the operating system you'd like to install, create a disk with either fixed or dynamically growing size. Installing the OS is simply done by mounting an ISO file or your hosts default CD-ROM drive.
If you need to do major updates on your virtual machine you can create snapshots to save the current state of the machine. In case your machine crashes, you can just revert to the last snapshot.
Similar to the VMware Player you have to compile a kernel module to make VirtualBox run under linux. All in all it's a nice and quick solution for developers to set-up a VM for test purposes like cross-browser validation of a website.
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