Virtualbox

[bashrules]

Hi,

In the future, I'll often need to run several VMs. I don't have any experience with virtualization, yet. With this posting, I want to investigate if FreeBSD can be used for this.

FreeBSD would run as 64bit OS on a multicore AMD machine (which I haven't bought yet).

It looks like virtualbox is my only (reasonable) choice on FreeBSD.


- Does everything work out of the box, e.g. usb, sound, networking, drag and drop?

- What is the performance loss? Can I watch youtube videos on a somewhat modern computer?

- It is my limited understanding that virtual box can use VMWARE images as well. Is this correct?

- Can I create images from an installation iso with virtual box?

- Can I use virtualbox images under VMWARE as well?


Is there a reason why I shouldn't run Virtual box on FreeBSD?

[J65nko]

Have you seen/read http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/jails.html ? In many cases that is a suitable alternative to running VMs.

[bashrules]

Hello J65nko, I'm required to use windows (and perhaps linux) VMs. Unfortunately, this rules out jails.

[adamk]

usb passthrough won't work on VirtualBox on a FreeBSD host. video and sound will work fine. Not sure about drag and drop.

VirtualBox can use vmware vmdk images, bu vmware can't use VirtualBox VDI images. You can install to a disk image in virtualbox from an ISO.

[vermaden]

Originally Posted by adamk

usb passthrough won't work on VirtualBox on a FreeBSD host.

From: http://wiki.freebsd.org/VirtualBox#head-6da12b755a43469f5f155f372201f5bdfe713c04

USB support

This requires at least VirtualBox 4.0.0

... and just follow the rest of the instructions.

[adamk]

Hey, thanks for that vermaden! I never knew it was possible :-)

Adam

[vermaden]

Welcome mate.

[sharris]

For FreeBSD if you want to run virtualbox-ose-4.0.8, netbeans-6.9.1 and anything else of 2011 you are force to use perl-5.12.3 and python27-2.7.1_1 and perl needs libutil.so.9 which comes in FBSD-9.0 .. so basically GNOME is being murderized and left behind with FBSD-8.2. So J65nko is right, jail is the only way or a darn good hack... Since we have no choices, I rather hack and I think I'm learning how to build a jail from ground up.

Heres a brand new manual and is very good. Fifteen chapters ... a page for BSD and the rest for Windows and LINUX, as usual. FreeBSD is building a new manual too.

http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#idp11332240
....

[vermaden]

Originally Posted by sharris

For FreeBSD if you want to run virtualbox-ose-4.0.8, netbeans-6.9.1 and anything else of 2011 you are force to use perl-5.12.3 and python27-2.7.1_1 and perl needs libutil.so.9 (...)

That depends, You can always do 'things' like that to omit additional perl package:

~ % cd /var/db/pkg 
/var/db/pkg % ls -l | grep perl
drwxr-xr-x  2 root  wheel  10 2011.06.03 09:04 perl-5.10.1_3/
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  13 2011.05.23 10:24 perl-5.12.3 -> perl-5.10.1_3

If You use STABLE, then packages are (re)build every 2 weeks, so new packages should be already available on the FTP.

[raindog308]

Originally Posted by bashrules

It looks like virtualbox is my only (reasonable) choice on FreeBSD.

You could also investigate qemu.

[vermaden]

Originally Posted by raindog308

You could also investigate qemu.

He used 'reasonable' word

[Carpetsmoker]

I thought you liked qemu Vermaden? I remember you using it a lot anyway ...

[vermaden]

I was in FreeBSD 5.x and 6.x times when VirtualBox was not available on FreeBSD

I generally still like that project, its great when You need to *emulate* other architecture, but if you want to run x86 on x86, then its pointless to struggle with QEMU slowness.