Virtal Machine preferences?

[Derek Broughton]

Andrew Farris wrote:

> On Sun, 2009-09-13 at 00:10 +0000, p.echols at comcast.net wrote:
> [snip]
>> The first question: there some reason to use one over the other? 
>> Features or ease of use?
> 
> I dont know about feature compares to VMware, but I make plenty of use
> of my VirtualBox OSE install doing test installs of various OSes, among
> other things.  If you care about such things, Virtualbox OSE is open
> source, whereas I believe that VMware is not.

The VMWare _server_ component is open source.  So it compares to virtualbox-
ose.  

> also, Virtualbox is in the
> Repos (as somebody else already said) so it gets auto-updated, and the

The big advantage of virtualbox, imo, is that they have their own 
Debian/Ubuntu repo, so that you can get more up-to-date version 
automatically (and they are releasing updates at a very high rate).

> kernel module needed to run it gets automatically rebuilt when theres
> any kernel upgrades (whereas with VMware, if it has a similar setup, you
> would probably have to recompile the kernel module on each kernel
> update)

Er, actually virtualbox has to recompile the kernel module on each kernel 
update, too...  I don't _know_ whether VMWare uses the same mechanism, but 
it _should_.
-- 
derek