Teknovis

I previously described how I wanted to virtualise my laptop in Virtualising my Laptop. I have made some progress with this, but not as much as I would have liked :(

I heard some great recommendations for VirtualBox recently, so I decided to investigate it a bit further. I found the following articles the most useful:

• VMware vs. VirtualBox Part 2 is very recent, and it provides a very good performance comparison. (The original, but now out-dated article is VMware vs. VirtualBox.)
• Is it a Real Box or is it VirtualBox? provides a performance overview of the latest version of VirtualBox.
• Both VirtualBox 3.0.4 vs. VMware Workstation 6.5.3 and VirtualBox 3.1.2 vs VMware Player 3.0 (First Class Flyer) provide objective and subjective comparisons.

I think that all of this is enough to convince me that VirtualBox is a real contender! The next step is to download it and try it myself :)

I also did some reading about how the virtual machine software handles multiple cores and Hyper-threading. It appears that it is able to distinguish between them, and it will always allocate cores before a Hyper-threaded unit. I understand this from reading the following two documents:

• Performance Tuning and Benchmarking Guidelines for VMware Workstation 6
• HyperThreading Support in VMware ESX Server 2

This weekend I also downloaded Ubuntu 10.04, although I have not had time to try it yet.

Tags: Ubuntu, VirtualBox, VMware