niflheim

So I gave up and tried 32 bit guests, just for the sake of testing and comparing.

I finally managed to get VBox functional on OS X.  Installed Ubuntu and discovered that I can lock up the VM at will by “ls -lR /”.  This only happens under OS X and actually reinforces my suspicion that my Macbook Pro has a hardware problem.  But maybe VBox is buggy on that platform.  I switched to Windows as the host OS for reliability (…)

I decided to try OpenSolaris (for the first time) under VBox.  I have a long-standing hatred of Solaris’ installation procedure and “user experience”, and have to say that Sun/We/Gaia are going very much in the right direction with this.  Gnu userland utilities would probably cause me to switch to OpenSolaris on my *desktop*, never mind the server.

Ubuntu “server” seemed to have mostly similar performance between VMware Server and VirtualBox.  Ubuntu “desktop” was dramatically better under VirtualBox (and, to continue gushing, Gnome under OpenSolaris/VBox was also dramatically better than Unbuntu/Gnome/VMware).  For whatever reason, Ubuntu/Gnome/VMware is too slow for usability.

So, all in all a mostly positive experience.  I need to investigate whether my Macbook is fubar (very likely), and Sun/We/Gaia need to enable 64 bit guests.  As I’m doing rather important things in my VMs, I confess that I will continue to trust VMware more for at least the near future.

They definitely have some competition, however.  And that’s good for virtualization.