For some time now, I’ve been using VirtualBox. It works pretty well. It’s integration with the host operating system (i.e. Mac OS X) is a little lacking. The handling of USB devices is a little clumsy. But it is free, and if it is free, you tend to make do with some minor inconveniences. It’s not really a big deal if you need the virtualization only occasionally.

But a friend recently started evaluating VMware Fusion, and my interest in it was piqued. I’m not new to VMware. I’ve used various flavours of VMware on both Windows and Linux. But so far, not Fusion on Mac OS X. So, alright, it was time to give it a try. It worked good enough for me. You can read plenty of reviews of VMware Fusion on the Internet, so I’m not going to write another one.

While evaluating VMware Fusion, I thought about Parallels Desktop. It has also received favourable reviews. A bit question on my mind was, which is faster? Put features aside for a while, let’s see which virtualization platform runs faster. Speed, inevitably, is going to be one important consideration.

So, I put together my very simple benchmark of VMware Fusion 3 vs Parallels Desktop 5 carrying out a few simple tasks.

Yes, I know this is not the most professional or comprehensive benchmark, but it tells me a few important things I want to know. It appears like Parallels Desktop 5 is quicker at getting things done inside the guest OS once the VM has started up. I suppose if you tend to leave a VM running for long periods and do a lot work inside it, this will be an important advantage.

Interestingly, I noted previously that Parallels Desktop 5 was a lot faster at restarting itself than VMware Fusion 3. It can take VMware Fusion 3 about the 38s it scored in the above table to restart itself, but Parallels Desktop 5 would take only like 12s. It is quite remarkable.

If you need a more professional benchmark comparison, check out this article from MacTech, and another one in Wikipedia.

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Virtualization is becoming the new OS. I was having a discussion with my colleagues this morning. VMware has a very clever strategy with their VMware ESX platform. This is the VMware virtualization solution that runs directly on hardware, without needing any underlying operating system like Windows or Linux. They’ve squeezed themselves beneath the operating system. Your typical applications require an operating system to run on. Most other virtualization solutions require an operating system to run on (or to run with). I know all these, but what is not so obvious is the far reaching significance of such a positioning.

VMware ESX offers features such as virtual switching, Fibre Channel HBA consolidation, and a bunch of other virtualization stuffs that hide the complexities of the underlying infrastructure from the higher layer Guest OS. They also apparently work with hardware manufacturers such as IBM and Cisco to integrate advanced hardware and software capabilities into the virtualization layer, again making it transparent to the Guest OS. For example, Cisco will offer a virtual software switch that can be plugged into the VMware ESX infrastructure.

Do you see this coming? The virtualization layer is becoming the new operating system. The traditional operating systems like Windows and Linux have become “applications” that run on the virtualization layer. (I omitted to mention Mac OS X because their EULA forbids you to install the OS on anything other than Apple hardware… I imagine installing it in a virtual machine would be disallowed as well.)

If you take this one step further, the “application” is really the entire OS-application stack… such as LAMP/WAMP (the Linux/Windows-Apache-MySQL-Perl/PHP/Python/etc platform) as well as the user application sitting on that platform. This is the Virtual Appliance.

Now we worry about hardware compatibility with the operating system. In the virtualization generation, we only need to worry about the hardware being compatible with the virtualization layer.

This will be the next generation of operating systems in the data centre.

Now, I wonder if VirtualBox has “running on bare-metal” on their road-map.

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I’m now using VirtualBox on my MacBook. It’s a really great virtualization software similar to VMware and Parallels (both of which can run on a Mac OS X host computer). What’s even greater about VirtualBox is that it’s free, and opensource. VMware’s free editions, VMware Player and VMware Server, do not support Mac OS X hosts. At any rate, VMware Player is “crippled”, and VMware Server isn’t quite so suitable to run on a desktop/notebook environment. That makes VirtualBox about the only decent free virtualization software available on Mac OS X.

In fact, VirtualBox is a lot more than merely “decent”. It has all the features of Parallels and VMware, including Guest OS additions which provide enhancements such as mouse pointer integration, accelerated graphics performance and arbitrary screen resolutions. This is a lot better than other opensource virtualization software.

VirtualBox is not new. In fact, I first heard about it last year, but was not impressed when at that time hardware virtualization support was not available on Mac OS X hosts. Since then, the Mac OS X version has been brought up on par with the other host OSes supported (which include Windows, Linux and Solaris). VirtualBox is backed by Sun Microsystems, which could explain the high quality and usability and polished interfaces.

Back to my Windows XP installation. It’s been something I’ve been wanting to get done for a long time. Most of the time I can survive entirely on Mac OS X, since just about everything I need can be done natively in Mac OS X. But our world is so entrenched with Microsoft Windows that there are still a bunch of things that are unavoidable. Like our dear IRAS tax portal, which absolutely requires Internet Explorer (I tried unsuccessfully with Safari and Firefox). Or the Nokia Software Update application used to upgrade firmware on Nokia phones. So just for these few rare occasions, I would need Windows XP around.

As mentioned, my Windows XP booted in 20 seconds. That was with SP2. After upgrading to SP3, and installing all the security updates, my Windows XP now boots in 26 seconds. This is from the time the VM has been initialized and just about the begin loading the OS, to the time that the Windows XP desktop is ready to be used. It’s fast, but that could be because the host OS has cached lots of the disk reads.

I’m delighted that now I have easy access to a Windows XP desktop at any time.

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