VirtualBox
I added The Linux Action Show! Podcast to my listening list today and got immediate benefits. I nearly stopped listening within the first minute since the two guys try and do the fake "radio guy" voice a little too much. Luckily they leveled off a short bit later and began to sound pretty much like any two random tech people I know. One of the items in their news section mentioned that a new version of VirtualBox is available.
I'd never heard of VirtualBox before, but I'm a big fan of virtualization and I liked the features they were mentioning. It came at a great time for me as I have been debating buying VMWare Workstation for home use, replacing the free VMWare Player (I also use VMWare server on a dedicated machine). I'd been getting a little irritated at the lack of snapshots in Player lately.
I'm on Ubuntu and I use a Windows VM for assorted applications that don't work under Linux (and are flaky under Wine). Occasionally I feel like trying a random Windows program out. I'd like the option to roll back the VM to a known good state in case anything happens. VirtualBox has an open source version and an enterprise version that is free for personal use–both have snapshot support. I tried out the latter, which also has an iSCSI feature I want to play with later (which is supported by FreeNAS). My initial impressions are very good. It supports snapshots, automatic guest OS desktop resizing, and automatic keyboard and mouse capture and release. Plus it's free for me. Those are the big things I want in a desktop VM application. The performance is also somewhat snappier for several of the programs I use regularly under the Windows VM.
I'll probably still need VMWare player for some more exotic operating systems that might not work 100% with VirtualBox, but that's fine. I'll be sure to update this if anything starts to go badly wrong, but for now it looks like I've got a new VM solution at home. Color me happy.
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