June 5
Virtual Box - Virtualization, the way FOSS (Free and Open source) does it
Posted by AjayHow it all began
It was one of those fine Wednesday mornings when my machine crashed for no obvious reason, well there was an obvious reason, it was a Windows machine. So grumbling all the way, I started contemplating life and it’s grand ironies, when I decided for better or for worse to switch over to Ubuntu. It worked great, I loved the interface, the speed, the no crashing, aptitude was my best friend. But then all of a sudden my world started crashing down in little pieces.
This was when I realized I could not watch Kimi Raikkonen in his Scuderia Ferrari, trying to take the Formula One championship season by storm , nor could I watch the team of my heart, the glorious boys in blue playing cricket to win the world cup for my motherland. All this because my paid subscription to streaming video sites, needs installation of sopcast or TVUplayer’s streaming plugin and as luck would have it Ubuntu did not support either of those. In addition I could not use my favourite image editor, Paint.NET
So as I was contemplating the grand ironies, I came across VirtualBox, and suddenly my world became a better place to live. I could both have the cake and eat it, I became alive and started loving life.
What is it??
Virtual Box is a virtualization software . It is also commonly known as a hypervisor or a VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor) whichis a platform virtualization software that can allow multiple OSes to run on a host system concurrently. Hypervisors maybe of two types:
- Type 1: native hypervisors runs directly on the host’s hardware as a hardware control. The guest OS runs on a level about the hypervisor. This is the classic VM architecture. Ex: Oracle VM
- Type 2: hosted hypervisors are software applications that run within a conventional operating system environment. Ex: VirtualBox.
Another term used with VirtualBox is paravirtualization, a virtualization software that connects the Guest OS to the hardware through a virtual software interface. Paravirtualization provides many benefits over Full Virtualization Increased security as Host server cannot access virtual machine neither can there be communication between VMs. Failsafe and redundancy by distributing VM over multiple hosts VirtualBox provides many of the features available in all other Virtualization software. The greatest thing about it is that it is Open Source, competing with VMWare Fusion. With it’s modularity, shared folder concept, provides an almost seamless way to running multiple “guest” OSes. It provides built in RDP server that allows us to use an RDP client to view the desktop which is pretty cool. It also has USB support. It works on x86 and AMD architcture based machines. It has got some excellent documentation, although their snapshot feature was little badly documented. Another issue is that It doesn’t have OpenGL / DirectX support yet, but that does not affect me yet.
Allin all, a grat way to run all those other operating systems you wanted, for none of the cost that VMware brings you. I give VirtualBox a 4/5 star for performance, ease of use and user documentation.
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