VMWare to VirtualBox

Monday Feb 25, 2008

I have already started using VirtualBox at home on my Mac for some time (Yes, long before the Sun acquisition of innotek), and I like it a lot. AFAI can fell, It's faster than VMWare. Maybe that's because I haven't used VMWare's top tier softwares, all I've been using are Workstation and Server.

OK, so today I decide to move the Virtual Windows Lab I've played with for a long time (~ 2 years) at work to VirtualBox also. The current lab includes 3 Windows servers and 3 clients, all connected into one domain, and I use it to check my codes on Kerberos and SPNEGO etc etc. The whole thing uses 70GB on an amd64 machine.

I spend half a day's time to reconstruct the virtual lab, and it's very successful. Now there're 4 machines inside: a KDC (2k3), an IIS (2k3), an XP, and a Vista. It's quite enough for common experiments now. BTW, the other OS in my previous lab are a Win2K (for interop) and a German XP (as a general foreign OS). There are one thing to note anyway:

VirtualBox's NAT style of network is different from VMWare's. For VMWare, it's a single network inside the host that's not touchable by the outside, but all guests on it can communicate with one another. For VirtualBox, this is not true. If you install several NAT guests, each of them are isolated in their own private network (all with IP 10.0.2.15 assigned). In order for them to talk to each other, you use a different style of network setting, called "Internal Network", which you can created multiple instances, each with a different name. In order to access the world, just add a second NIC to the guest with NAT style.

After the domain is established, I install MSVC and MKS and Java quickly, now everything is OK. The first batch of log files are already on its way... very fast and smooth!

Like this post? | | | |

Posted at 05:38PM Feb 25, 2008 by wangwj in General
Tags: