VMware Workstation is the undisputed leader in desktop virtualization tools. Yet VirtualBox, now being ridden by Oracle after making headway under Sun, continues to mount a challenge.

VirtualBox made the cut in the wake of the acquisition of Sun by Oracle back in January, and Wednesday marked the first release of what is now called Oracle VM VirtualBox.

In the previous post, I have tried to explain how to install Grid Infrastructure on your VirtualBox instance. In this post, before moving to the next post in which I will be explaining RDBMS 11g Release 2 configuration, I wish to look at a new tool shipped with Grid Infrastructure, namely ASMCA(ASM Configuration Assistant).

The first beta release of VirtualBox 3.1 is now available. You can download the binaries at http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/3.1.0_BETA1/

Version 3.1 will be a major update. The following major new features have been added

To read the entire article at its source, please refer to VirtualBox 3.1 Beta 1 now available for download

The first beta release of VirtualBox 3.1 is now available. You can download the binaries at http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/3.1.0_BETA1/

Version 3.1 will be a major update. The following major new features have been added:

I'm especially interested in "support for OpenSolaris Boomer architecture" which hopefully means a working microphone in a guest on my laptop - that would mean a working Skype on VB/Windows :)

Version 3.1 will be a major update. The following major new features were added:
To read the entire article at its source, please refer to VirtualBox 3.1.0 Beta 1 released

In Oracle 11g Release 2 you will find that things have changed even for single instance database installation. I will try to illustrate in this series of posts how to install a single instance Oracle 11g Release 2 database to your Linux machines.

As the first part of our installation series, we will start by installing brand new Grid Infrastructure which you might think to be a fancy name for CRS+ASM but you will find out later that it is a bit more.

I'm a frequent VMware user for years. Most of my setups are done in a Virtual Machine. It's very convenient because with a new host installation, just installing VMware and restoring the virtual machines gets you up and running.

One of the names that comes around on Virtualization on Linux is VirtualBox. I did not pay any attention to it since I was quite happy with VMware. I use VMware Server, since it's free and has about every feature VMware Workstation had in the latest version I used. That was Workstation 5.5 and the only thing Server lacked was Shared Folders.

A security vulnerability in the VBoxNetAdpCtl configuration tool for certain Sun VirtualBox 3.0 packages may allow local unprivileged users who are authorized to run VirtualBox to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges.

Sun would like to acknowledge with thanks, Thomas Biege of SUSE Linux for bringing this issue to our attention.

• - vdi or "Virtual Disk Image", the native format for VirtualBox
• - vmdk - VMware's format
• - vhd - Microsoft's format
•  

To read the entire article at its source, please refer to VirtualBox Virtual Disk formats

While VirtualBox does reboot rather fast since it virtualised, but why not faster ? Since the bug with VirtualBox and OpenSolaris was fixed we should be able. And indeed we are.

By taking out VirtualBox from the blacklist of the boot-config SMF service we can then do Fastreboot within a VirtualBox guest with no issues :)

To read the entire article at its source, please refer to Fastreboot and VirtualBox

Please do not use this VirtualBox Beta release on production machines. A VirtualBox Beta release should be considered an experimental release meant for early evaluation and testing purposes.

You can download the binaries here: http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/3.0.6_BETA1/

I’ve had some problems since my upgrade to virtualbox 2.2.0 on OpenSolaris. After some time all of my linux boxes seem to just die. The virtual machine just stops responding. Strangely there was no problem with my windows vms after the update.

I use VirtualBox to allow me to run multiple OS on one machine. It is a powerful virtualization product, with rich features. It is an Open Source Software. It runs on Windows, and supports all of Windows OS'es, Linux, Solaris, OpenBSD, just to name a few.

To read the entire article at its source, please refer to Cloning a Virtual Harddrive - VirtualBox

VirtualBox is an awesome bit of kit and I <3 it long time ten-dorrah.

But by default when your virtual copy of Windows/Linux/Solaris/Whatever grabs an IP address, it does so through NAT, and at version 3.0.4, this means it gives us a default Category A network address (i.e. 10.x.y.z).

To read the entire article at its source, please refer to Make VirtualBox Use Your Router’s DHCP to get an IP Address in Linux

Let's say that, like me, you once created a fixed-size virtual disk in VirtualBox, and installed FreeBSD on it. Now you've run out of disk space and you'd like to move your FreeBSD to a bigger-sized virtual disk. Here's how I did it. This procedure was done with VirtualBox 2.0.{4, 6} on Windows XP.

First, with VirtualBox not running,  make a backup copy of the whole .VirtualBox folder, just in case.

VirtualBox by Sun Microsystems is a fabulous piece of computer virtualization software.  It is easy to install and use, and there are both paid and free versions of the product.

I like VirtualBox better then Microsoft Virtual PC because Virtual PC has a lot of problems with Linux operating systems. (I had a hell of a time trying to get Red Hat to work in Virtual PC) I have installed Windows and Linux Operating Systems on VirtualBox with no problems what so ever.

Do you use virtualization software? This type of software lets you run multiple operating systems at the same time on a single computer. For example, if your main operating system is Windows Vista, you can be running Windows 7, Ubuntu, and Windows XP at the same time inside the virtualization software given that you have enough RAM to support it. There are many virtualization software out there, however the two most well known are Sun xVM VirtualBox and VMware products. I will be comparing VirtualBox 3.0.4 and VMware Workstation 6.5.3.

Running the benchmark became a very tedious job as it took hours to finish. Furthermore, KVM isn't stable enough to finish Linux installation and benchmarking! Although I managed to installed Ubuntu as guest OS in KVM, I am unable to get a full set of performance data.
BTW, I hate that PTS doesn't store any date until the whole test suite is finished which make it ever harder in KVM case.

I've recently starting using VirtualBox instead of physical machines for some of my basic functional testing.  When doing some types of kernel development it is often necessary to force the system into kmdb.

The F1-A keystroke does this on OpenSolaris x86 systems by default, however that isn't going to work with VirtualBox because that keystore will be grabbed by some very low level kernel routines in the host an never reaches the guest.

Sun Microsystems, the maker of the Java platform, has updated VirtualBox, the popular virtualization program for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. Version 3.0.4 of the software is a maintenance release and delivers the usual laundry of fixes and improvements.

All you need is software called virtual box. VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software.

features of the VirtualBox:

To read the entire article at its source, please refer to Virtual Operating Systems

I wanted to share a directory from my main machine so I could import Second Life logs into my VM development environment. (I could try SL ona VM, but I'm guessing I need all the performance I can get!).

Two things to remember:

To read the entire article at its source, please refer to Mounting a shared drive in Virtualbox

You can create VirtualBox virtual machines from command line in 3 easy steps. We will assume Ubuntu 9.10 in the following example.

1. Create new virtual machine:

   $ VBoxManage createvm --name "Ubuntu 9.10" --register

2.  
3. Create virtual hard disk (5 GB):

   $ VBoxManage createhd --filename "Ubuntu.vdi" --size 5000 --remember

4.  
5. Modify virtual machine:

If you have ever used virtual machines, you may be familiar with virtual disks. Recently I installed Microsoft Windows XP as a guest operating system (OS) on my Ubuntu 9.04 host using VirtualBox. I created 10GB, dynamically expanding virtual disk for XP, thinking that should be enough (I was only putting Windows dependent programs onto it anyway). But lo and behold, I soon ran out of space. The goal now was to extend it to 15GB. I found an article online that explained this but it seemed really long and complicated. So referencing basic computer know-how, this is how I did it.

To read the entire article at its source, please refer to Virtualbox 3.0.2 bridged network bug workaround

There are a lot of cases where having one computer just isn't enough. If you're a web developer or webmaster, you'll want to view your website in more than one browser. If you're a PHP programmer, you may be itching to check out the new 5.3 release and test your web applications on it. Using virtualization, you can set up self-contained instances of any Operating System configured to your heart's content on your computer.

A shared folder for Virtualbox can enable you to share a folder or folders with your Linux install and virtualbox. So you could choose one of your home folders like music videos or whatever it is you are working with. So here is how you setup and access your shared folder.

As a Linux administrator or as as Desktop user, there are times when you would either like to try a different distribution or when you need several test machines that you can blow away when you are done with them..  I have used VMWare with a a lot of success over the years but VirtualBox provides an excellent option that is Open Source. VirtualBox 3.0 just came out and is a great upgrade to an excellent product.  This tutorial will show you how to install and use the options based on a Debian Lenny install.