Why I moved to Sun VirtualBox for Web Development on Vista

Driver signing annoyances

I've used VMWare for years, since version three of VMWare Workstation.  It used to be the only way to run another OS inside Windows, and so was a great way to learn about different distributions without any dual boot shenanigans.  However, my new machine is running Vista, and I ran into issues straight away with the network adapters that VMWare installs: Windows Vista won't let it run because the drivers have not been signed by Microsoft. 

The upshot of this is that you can't run VMWare on Vista unless you disable driver signing each time you boot, which of course is unacceptable.  Add to this the fact that Fedora Core 9 didn't install on VMWare correctly, and I naturally started looking around for alternatives.

Sun VirtualBox

What I needed was a product that filled the following requirements:

  • Must be free to use
  • Must work on Vista
  • Must be fairly lightweight
  • Must support Linux distros like Fedora
  • Ideally supports snapshots

Sun VirtualBox actually fills all those requirements, and more.  It's actually a GPL product, which I like.  In fact, GPL products for Windows are 'growing up' - I'm using OpenOffice exclusively now, whereas a couple of years ago I'd only have considered playing around with it a little bit and then uninstalling.  Also, VirtualBox is just as easy to use as VMWare, and I can configure system resources in the same way.  

No doubt, there are features in VMWare products that VirtualBox lacks, but as a developer, I'm normally only really interested in those listed above.  There have been times when I've thought it would be nice to start several guest OS instances as a cluster or to do complex networking simulations, but the reality is that I can't really test what I need to test in those scenarios, and the host machines are generally a little to slow for it to be practical.

VirtualBox Guest Additions Problems

Update: I've now been using VirtualBox for a few days, and ran into difficulties installing the guest additions that are required for things like accessing shared folders, changing resolutions etc. 

I'm running VirtualBox on an AMD 64bit processor, and I have 64 bit Vista, with 64 bit VirtualBox software.  I'm also running 64-bit Fedora, so I installed the 64-bit guest additions for AMD processors.  On version 2.02, my advice is don't!  Eventually, I manually mounted the guest additions ISO image (it wouldn't auto-mount at that point), and installed the x86 guest additions. I'm happy to report that this works fine.

 

 


© eCreate Web Services Limited, 2008