Secretary or data center?
VirtualBox is highly popular among end users, found on over five million desktops already. Recently, I observed a discussion about VirtualBox and what it can be used for. Eventually it turned into a dispute whether it's suitable for server deployments. "VirtualBox is for the secretary whereas *** is for the data center because ..... well, because." Is it true that VirtualBox does not target server deployments and other products such as Sun xVM Server or VMware ESX should be used for running virtual machines on server hardware?
Well, yes and no. VirtualBox in reality is much more than a simple to use end user product. The way you download it from virtualbox.org, it's a distribution containing (among other things) a hypervisor, virtual device modules, an RDP server and an application programming interface (API) on top of which we've developed a nice and simple to use graphical interface. Our distribution is perfect for end users but it just being a distribution, it means that everyone is able to take the pieces and assemble them in a different way and create a new distribution.
We have lots of customers that benefit from VirtualBox as the only truly modular virtualization software and build their own products on top of VirtualBox. Some of them implement their own virtual PCI cards, others integrate VirtualBox with web interfaces they've developed. With its high performance, integrated RDP server and API, VirtualBox is ideally suited to be the heart of solutions for VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) and we have customers marketing VirtualBox based VDI software that can run hundreds of desktops on a single server.
Now when looking at high end server workloads, I have to admit that VirtualBox doesn't have all the features imaginable. We do not support 64-bit guests, we only present one CPU to each guest (but we do make use of all cores) and we can't transfer a running virtual machine from one server to another (live migration). That might be not enough for some scenarios but you will be surprised how little time will pass until those features become available...
