virtualbox
VirtualBox – Peaking Interest as a Serious Competitor
Dec 16th
I’ve said for year VirtualBox was good stuff. I’ve used it since it was previously owned directly by Innotek. Now that Sun has purchase the relatively small European company, the software has exploded with new features and stability. Years ago usb support was in its infancy. Now its robust. Years ago processor support was limited, now its fully SMP enabled. I like the nested paging option reducing ram overhead, and integrating guests into, rather than partitioning, the host. A while back there was problems with the host processor no syncing completely with the guest, causing load when no guest load was present. This was resolved a long time ago, and now running multiple machines only causes load on the lost when load is indeed in the guest. My system has run stably for a long time now, only requiring host reboots when new updates are available.
How can paid system compete with free? I can understand in a Corporate environment commercial support may be needed. In such an application I would imagine Sun provides commercial level support for their VirtualBox product. This is indeed the case for the paid systems of Vmware, Parallels, and others. But ultimately if in house tech support is up to the task VirtualBox is a free product. This also allows for people to get their hands on it for learning purposes. I have learned VirtualBox by working it for years. I am very much discouraged to learn many software packages because I would have to pay for it. I will not be learning Windows 7 for this reason.
San Francisco – Desktop virtualization is one of those technologies that confound the experts. Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, along comes some interloping development to upset the apple cart. Most recently, that role has fallen to Sun’s VirtualBox, the plucky open source VM solution that’s quickly gobbling up the general-purpose desktop virtualization space left vacant by Microsoft and VMware. Users from the three major platforms — Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux — are flocking to VirtualBox for its scalability, robust networking, and bargain price point (it’s free).[Source]
Extended VirtualBox Management – VBoxTool
Dec 9th
VBoxManage, the command line tool of VirtualBox, does its job. It also has its limitations. You can starts, pause, and save virtual machines, but there is no integrated way to automate various processes. To have a virtual machine boot with the host, in headless mode, you would have to create a custom init.d boot script. A great script package, call VBoxTool, coordinates the process into a terminal app. The terminal app refereneces two configuration files in your /etc directory, and utilizes an init script to boot virtual machines. VBoxTool is at sourceforge:
http://vboxtool.sourceforge.net/
Configure the machines you want to boot in:
/etc/vboxtool/machines.conf
Any machine listed in machines.conf will boot with the host. You can view running machines with:
vboxtool showrun
Then you can also view all available machines with:
vboxtool show
Maybe this wrapper script will be integrated into VBoxManage directly; it is clear the features are useful especially for system administrators.
VirtualBox Vista Images Coming Back
Dec 3rd
I’m installing a copy of Vista in a virtual machine right now. The license will expire, but I’m not installing it for useful purposes. I’m going to re-add previously lost images to the most popular page on this website.
http://www.bgevolution.com/blog/virtualbox-windows-vista-host-network-bridge-and-tap/
Although I find the page quite unnecessary, being the way to implement host networking has changed significantly, many people do not heed the notice posted quite conspicuously at the top of the page. By tomorrow the images will be back 
VirtualBox Bridge and Tap no Longer Needed – Built in
Nov 3rd
With recent version of VirtualBox you no longer need to create a bridge and tap to enable host networking. In the settings panel of the virtual machine, select the network tab, and make sure that its set on bridged adapter. VirtualBox automatically creates a virtual ethernet adapter, and bridges it to the network of the host machine.
Bridging to the host network is necessary for the virtual machine to get an ip address from the router. Such a configuration is needed to communicate with the machine from the outside world. Because of this feature virtual machines can server website, and other services. I use my virtual machine to host this website, a visual ftp server, a wiki, and an EyesOS server.
There are other ways to forward individual ports from the host system to the guest, but then the ports on the host machine will not be accessible on the host; they will virtually represent the guest OS thus hindering connectivity with the host machine. There may be instances where this is what is wanted and more information, including instruction, can be found on this previous post.
The following is a screenshot of the network tab in VirtualBox. It had a bridge adapter option that will autobridge the connection to an existing ethernet adapter. Bare in mind that this is the screen from a Linux install of VirtualBox and it might be different in Windows. I remember in Windows you might have the option to create a virtual ethernet adapter, and then you can bridge the connection all in VirtualBox. Nothing needs to be done manually anymore, and everything can be done from within the VirtualBox configuration panels.
Here is a screen from Windows Vista. Go to the network tab of the virtual machine settings:
Then select the attach to drop down menu:
Then change the attach to, drop down menu, to bridged adapter:
VirtualBox 3.0.4 DHCP Hard Lock
Aug 22nd
As previously posted there is an ongoing issue with vboxnet0. It is the apparent cause of a system wide hard lock. I don’t think its a hardware issue, although it may end up being one. I hope not, therefore I will be investigating all possible software causes. Given the complexity of my system if can be many many things. It could be the bios, and general motherboard instability; and virtualbox has reported stability issues. It could be compiz, or the the binary nvidia drivers. I will know more soon.
Linux Hard Lock – VirtualBox and Kernel Timer
Aug 22nd
I have had system instability for some time now. It seems to be cause by several things given the complexity of my system. VirtualBox has an ongoing bug in its 3.0.4 version dealing with how its modules handle ip addressing. More is discussed in this forum thread, but it seems to be avoided by using static ip configurations in your guests. I also have had a variety of kernel panics resulting in flashing keyboard lights (caps, ect..). Two things to help with this, upgrade the bios of your motherboard to the most recent stable version. I still think the bios of my M3A78-T is the culprit. The hpet timer seems to be unstable as a result of the motherboard, the processor, or the bios. I’m not quite sure whether its solely hardware or software related. Although when I set a variety of kernel parameters the system substantially increases in stability. I currently turn off the hpet timer, and use jiffies as the clocksource. To enable these parameters open your grub configuration file /boot/grub/menu.lst and add them to the kernel line that you typically boot from.
