Open source VMWare work-a-like

Published on January 22nd, 2007 in General

The model of open-source software really seems to catch up. German developer InnoTek Systemberatung GmbH, decided to release its powerful virtualization software as open source. Virtual Box is a worthy contender to VMWare Workstation. It offers the same features, more or less, although they’re implementation might be a bit buggy at the moment, like the snapshot feature for example. But I guess this will be solved in a few months with the help of the community. Virtual Box further offers the following features (taken from its website):

• Modularity. VirtualBox has an extremely modular design with well-defined internal programming interfaces and a client/server design. This makes it easy to control it from several interfaces at once: for example, you can start a virtual machine in a typical virtual machine GUI and then control that machine from the command line, or possibly remotely. VirtualBox also comes with a full Software Development Kit: even though it is Open Source Software, you don’t have to hack the source to write a new interface for VirtualBox.
• Virtual machine descriptions in XML. The configuration settings of virtual machines are stored entirely in XML and are independent of the local machines. Virtual machine definitions can therefore easily be ported to other computers.
• Guest Additions for Windows and Linux. VirtualBox has special software that can be installed inside Windows and Linux virtual machines to improve performance and make integration much more seamless. Among the features provided by these Guest Additions are mouse pointer integration and arbitrary screen solutions (e.g. by resizing the guest window).

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