Sun Purchases Virtualbox

I have been in some excellent training this week and didn't have a chance to look into this announcement. But after reading a few reviews, I am pleasantly surprised. The company that developed the software, Innotek, was also a co-developer of Virtual PC. So they definitely have some experience in the field.

Virtual Box is virtual machine software much like VMWare or Virtual PC. The difference is, the software can run as a host operating system on just about any operating system and the software is open source. My takeways from a little reading is this:

• Performance is on par with VMWare. Pretty impressive given the VMWare product has been around a lot longer.


• The UI is pretty good and the software is very stable. However there is still room for improvement here and there.


• Innotek is working on a server version of their product that would be similar to VMWare ESX. This would allow you to run a number of virtual machines a single host for web hosting applications for example.

For more information, take a look at these links.

Blog Review by Liqudat - Includes performance numbers

Techworld Review - Very recent

Infoworld VM Product Comparison

Commentary by Infoweek