VirtualBox as a low cost, high quality desktop virtualisation client.

When it comes to desktop virtualisation there are two big players, VMware Workstation and Parallels. Less well known is the Sun offering “VirtualBox”, which is available on Windows, Linux, OpenSolaris and Mac. Unlike VMware and Parallels, Sun are providing VirtualBox for free under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

As well as being a low/no cost desktop virtualisation client it offers
some very interesting features (from their website virtualbox.org):

• 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).
• Shared folders. Like many other virtualisation solutions, for easy data exchange between hosts and guests, VirtualBox allows for declaring certain host directories as “shared folders”, which can then be accessed from within virtual machines.
• Virtual USB Controllers. VirtualBox implements a virtual USB controller and allows you to connect arbitrary USB devices to your virtual machines without having to install device specific drivers on the host.
•  Remote Desktop Protocol. Unlike any other virtualisation software, VirtualBox fully supports the standard Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). A virtual machine can act as an RDP server, allowing you to “run” the virtual machine remotely on some thin client that merely displays the RDP data.
• USB over RDP. With this unique feature, a virtual machine that acts as an RDP server can still access arbitrary USB devices that are connected on the RDP client. This way, a powerful server machine can virtualise a lot of thin clients that merely need to display RDP data and have USB devices plugged in.

Desktop virtualisation is a common starting point for virtualisation in organisations. Virtual Box may well be an excellent starting point for people in organisations that need a robust product but are not quite ready for VMware Workstation.

To test it, we installed it under OSX on a MacBook Pro and give it a shot And it installed nice and easy. Creating a virtual machine is easy and the supported guest operating system list is getting longer and longer ( http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Guest_OSes ). We created a virtual machine running Windows XP direct from a CD without issue.

It was very responsive and worked first time. The RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) feature we thought would be very good if you have a spare machine to use as a semi-server. You can start up your virtual machine(s) and then just connect to them from your laptop/desktop via RDP which is available on all Windows machines.

Although it is not built for it, the RDP feature allows you to test the idea of VDI Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. VDI being when you run your desktop computers inside virtual machines on a server and users actually connect via RDP to the VM. There are some very good reasons to operate this way, and you can get a feel for it very quickly with VirtualBox.

In terms of what virtualisation client to use, we would recommend VMware most of the time. They remain the market leader and VMware working very hard to maintain that position. Virtual Machines created on their desktop version can with relative ease be moved to their various server offerings if you need them too, which is a big plus as ESX is a great performer.

That said, VirtualBox is a strong contender. The desktop client is very powerful and Sun is a large corporation with a strong engineering background, especially on the server side. So, you could expect VirtualBox to be well supported and stable. ESX from VMware may win on a larger deployment as ESX has a very small overhead and the management tools are mature, well tested and easy to use.

Parallels on the other hand has a much stronger following in the Mac community, and is most likely still the market leader there. Their server offering is less well known, but seems to being doing well. Their Virtuozzo product which virtualises at the operating system level (rather than hardware level) has for a long time been popular in the hosting business.

We must not discount Microsoft of course, they have virtualisation offerings coming, though seemingly all server side. Lastly Linux virtualisation offerings are popular in that community, KVM seems to be establishing itself as the standard.

If you are looking at virtualisation, there are many factors to consider; we are happy to help you consider them, plan and execute a pilot project and implement on a larger scale following the pilot. Please contact us on 020 7193 8987 to discuss your ideas or requirements.