5,000,000 Sounds Nice

It's amazing to see how fast xVM VirtualBox is accelerating.  I'm not talking about the speed of the virtualization engine, but instead the speed at which it's being adopted around the planet!  In fact it recently celebrated it's five millionth download.  Better yet, since the recent version 1.6 release, we've been averaging over 10,000 downloads per day.  That's an amazing rate for something as seemingly "geeky" as a hypervisor -- this isn't an office suite after all.

Beyond just downloads, we're starting to see a real increase in the amount of attention the software is getting.  In fact, Chhandomay just recently posted a summary of all the reviews the product has been receiving. However, what's even more exciting than mainstream press coverage is the fact that real people are using it and telling their friends.  Desktop options like Fusion and Parallels have been around on the Mac much longer than VirtualBox -- which only released final Mac support this month.  However, I was looking at a just published article on Lifehacker discussing how to run Windows on your Mac.  They didn't mention VirtualBox in the article, but several readers posted follow ups to the article with comments like these:

• Another absolutely free option is VitualBox from Innotek ([www.virtualbox.org]). Sun Microsystems has actually recently acquired them, but the Virtual Box code will remain open source. It runs great on Mac, and is not resource hungry.
• I have just dumped VMWare Server on Ubuntu for VirtualBox gotta say I am very impressed. I just checked and there is support for OS X and a choice of the Open Source Edition (OSE) or the Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL) - which has USB support. In Ubuntu a XP guest set to the defaults of 192MB RAM etc. runs almost as quickly as a real machine, VMWare was not as responsive or frugal.
• VirtualBox, btw, is easily as good as the commercial virtualization tools, and free
  

Posted at 03:00AM May 29, 2008 by Stephen Wilson in Virtualization  |  Comments[3]