Virtualbox web front-end

I mentioned before that virtualbox rocks. Now it rocks even harder. I've always wanted to run multiple virtual machines on a powerful, headless server. Previously there hasn't been an adequate user interface (read: not a command line) that lets me manage multiple virtualbox instances.

Now there is.

...and my doesn't it look pretty?

VMWare Server 2: Worse Than Failure

OK, so this is hardly breaking news, but I thought I'd share this mini-rant with you now any way.

At work We deal with multiple operating systems (WinXP, Vista, Linux), and multiple programming environments. A few weeks ago I decided to take the plunge and do all my development work inside virtual machines. The advantage of this approach is that it's very fast to switch from one environment to another (much faster than a whole machine reboot).

There are two problems with this approach:

1. Performance. Programming is a pretty CPU-intensive task. Well, compiling the code is anyway. Compiling our code base takes around an hour on a physical machine with top-of-the-line specs (this makes compiling the Linux kernel seem fast). On a virtual machine, that time doubles. This is an inescapable truth about software virtualization: there will always be some overhead.
2. Hardware. The applications I program need access to physical hardware, over a variety of interfaces, including RS232, RS422, USB, Parallel, TCP/IP, UDP/IP and a few others besides. Any software virtualization package must be able to forward all these hardware interfaces through to the virtual machine.

In my experience, the only software virtualization package that meets requirement 2 is VMWare. I know I've raved about Virtualbox before, and I was very tempted to use it again now, but it lacks the hardware support I need.

So, VMWare Server it is then. The next question then becomes: which version? I've used version 1.x before, and it fulfilled all my needs at the time. However, I noticed that version 2 is now available. I thought "In software, bigger numbers are better, right?"

After downloading the sevrer, and registerring for a free license key, I spent a busy 30 minutes clicking through the ubiquitous license agreements and installation options (does anyone ever read these things?). Everything was installed. I went to fire the application up, only to have it launch Mozilla Firefox. What's going on here? Then it hit me: a wave of fear and horror. What were they thinking?

The managment interface for VMWare Server 2 is web based.

That's right... you want to use your virtual machine? You need to run a web browser. The interface is slow, the browser plugin that supports the interface is buggy... I could go on, but some other people have detailed the problems with the software far better than I ever could (Yes, I realise that link is talking about the beta release. Trust me, nothing much has changed).

Maybe I'm missing something, some gold nugget of understanding that would make Server 2 more usable for me, but right now I just don't get it. Why would you decide that the primary interface to a virtual machine should reside inside a browser? Browsers are notorious for implementing different standards, being generally slow, memory-hogging apps that occaisonally crash. Who in their right mind would want to use a browser for their virtual machines?


Until then, I'll stick with VMWare server 1, thank you very much.

virtualbox rocks

I know I've said this before, but VirtualBox kicks ass. It has that whole "it just WORKS" feel to it. I realise that repeating yourself is supposedly one of the hallmarks of a bad blog, but please indulge me this once; VirtualBox deserves your attention. The image to your right shows virtualbox running windows XP - I'm installing Qt4.4 in the hope that some of the bugs I mentioned in my previous post have been cleaned up.

I'm also compiling the latest KDE4, which is where a multi-core system would be really nice. Until then, I'll continue to struggle with my old box.

Virtualisation under Linux

I've been doing some Qt development lately - a little cross platform utility that will save me lots of fingerwork when programming. I've found that certain aspects of Qt don't work the same under Windows as they do under Linux. In order to debug these niggly bugs I've begun running windows XP under a virtual machine.

I looked at three different virtualisation projects: bochs, QEMU, and VirtualBox. Of the three, virtualbox really stands out. It's a commercial product that is also released as open source software, and it really shows. The user interface is very similar to Microsoft virtual PC, possibly even a bit better.

It's been a long time since I tried running any virtualisation software under Linux, and I'm pleasantly surprised at the results.