I am planning to install VirtualBox to try out newer operating systems and tools.
Is it safe to install on office computer. Basically below are my questions.
Does VirtualBox consume lot of resources and slow down the system.
Is the installation heavy weight.
Is it easy to uninstall.
Does running a virtual PC (windows 8.1) on a Windows7 (host) pc has any issues?
How is the performance of the virtual OS (windows 8.1 in this case) compared to like a dual boot setup?
Are there any free better options than VirtualBox?
Memory is not an issue as I will be able to spare atleast 30gb for virtual box installation.
Really would appreciate your inputs.
Here's the gist:
Pro's:
Not too heavy to install(102MB installer)
Easy to setup
Easy to administer
Supports lots of OS's, up through Windows 10 (10 is slow)
Light performance hit for modern hardware
Easy to uninstall
Cons:
Company's computer (is that okay with them?)
Installs a network adapter (needs admin privilege)
Some performance hit (depends on hardware)
On my Athlon Phenom II X4 (made in 2011), with 8GB of RAM and 2 HDD's in RAID, with Radeon card, every OS I've tried runs smooth, except for Windows 10. You'll have to turn down (or off) translucent window borders and backgrounds, maybe, but that's it.
Windows 7 and 8 are as smooth as butter, but transparency is off. If you have a new Core I7 machine with buckets of RAM, you shouldn't have a problem.
Linux, FreeBSD, XP, even DOS and Win3 run in there with no problems.
Windows 8.1 Guest, under my Windows 7 Host worked just fine. Possibly turn a few bells and whistles off, but should work fine. I always use a Bridged connection, so the VM has its own IP address on my LAN. Windows 10 is slow at this point. I'm sure they'll address it soon.
Hope this helps.
Related
I am developing a .NET application, and have the luxury of doing this on a fairly powerful desktop PC. I want to ensure it runs okay on PCs with much lower spec, but I don't have spare machines kicking around and can't really afford to buy them. Is there any way to simulate a lower-spec PC on my current PC, to get a feel for how the software might run?
Any help or advice would be very much appreciated.
*My PC is Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit with 8-core Intel i7 and 16GB RAM.
You could install VMWare and install any OS you want, with any hardware specs you want, provided that they don't exceed your current working hardware of course.
Keep in mind that VMWare is just a virtualization layer. It emulates an OS but you are still running your code on the same i7.
http://www.asp.net/mobile/device-simulators Here is an example of several Visual Studio plug-ins that emulate devices. You can also install Windows 8 and run hyper-v. It's great for this kind of thing.
I am planning to develop an automated test solution with multiple windows machines and multiple ubuntu machines that perform related/interdependent tasks. To start the project, I'd like to have one or two windows machines (virtual) and a few ubuntu machines (virtual) running on a single desktop. It seems likely that I will be pushing a single desktop to the limit here so I am trying to guess if I will have better luck if my host OS is ubuntu or if it is Windows 7. I would be able to use the host OS as one of the machines in my environment. The desktop is some sort of above average Dell, but nothing really impressive.
Does anyone have any insight here? I've worked mostly with VMWare in the past and my host was windows along with my VMs.
Note: VirtualBox is a type-2 hypervisor (it runs on the host OS, not on the hardware like a type-1 hypervisor) and tends to offer weaker performance than, for example, Hyper-V, ESX or XEN (type-1 hypervisors).
Therefore, if performance is a considerable concern, you may squeeze more juice out of Win8 or Windows Server 2012 box running, for example, Hyper-V. Further reading on this here and here (YMMV).
How your environment will run when hosted by a Windows vs. a Linux box is, frankly impossible to tell. I suggest you build your VM's and try dual-booting your machine in Windows and Linux and measuring your scenario. Be sure to have enough RAM in the host to allocate enough working RAM to each VM and enough IO throughput that your host doesn't end up dragging the perf of all VM's down if one VM saturates the machine's IO.
One last note of caution though: Don't completely trust fine-grained perf results measured on VM's - even the best hypervisors cannot truly replicate the perf' characteristics of code running on bare-metal. Treat your measurements as a guideline only.
Measure, then measure again. Measure again just to be sure ... and THEN tweak your config and re-measure, measure, measure ;)
My $0.02:
If its VirtualBox you are using I would go with Ubuntu for certain. I have an AMD 945 Phenom with 16GB of Ram with 12.04LTS 64bit . I can usually have 2 VM's running Windows and / or Ubuntu guests and never consume more than 7 GBs of RAM . If your running them in a testing solution you could expect to probably see 12 maybe 13 GBs of RAM, but the CPU might be your problem. My AMD Phenom runs great, but would be maxed out for sure. I use VMWare at work and on my Laptop and would recommend that if you were running a Windows Host. I also have VMWare on my Ubuntu host, but it just does not run as well as it does on Windows., at least for me.
I wanted to begin with Android development. I intend to pursue it as a hobby and it is not my main job as a student. I use softwares like Matlab, COMSOL, MS Office, etc. on my current Windows PC. Therefore I needed isolation between my experimental projects and actual work.
For that I am going to format my pc and re-install the OS. I have two options:
1. To install Ubuntu first and then install Windows 7 on top of it (using VirtualBox).
2. Or similarly install Windows 7 first and then install Ubuntu on its top.
From a safety standpoint, it's my guess, that it's advisable to make my work OS (Win7) the base OS and then install my experimental OS (Ubuntu 11) on top. But please answer my following question purely from the standpoint of performance. Which is better: (Win + Virtual Ubuntu) or (Ubuntu + Virtual Win)? To frame it better I would ask, which is likely to be faster: a given random high performance software operating on Virtual Ubuntu (with Win base) or the same software operating on Virtual Win (with Ubuntu base)? Assume that the randomly picked high performance software has been designed to function on both operating systems (e.g. Matlab).
P.S.: Also if you know a better alternative to VirtualBox, please let me know.
From my experience Virtualbox performs quite good. For optimal performance and compatibility, you have to install additional packages though (i.e. for accessing USB drives etc, I guess you will need that anyway for android development). So, just use the system you want to use in your everyday work as the base and run the other one in virtualbox. For me, that's Ubuntu. For you it seems like Windows would be the natural choice.
However I don't really see the need to isolate on the operating system level at all. It's quite common to have different softwares for different tasks running on the same computer, on the same system. Why do you think that would be a problem?
I'd like to ask anybody who has built a virtualized VS2010 environment in VirtualBox or VMware, which one was able to work out of the box without too much tweaking? Or both need workarounds to get stuff working?
Both are fine as long as you install the respective tools and drivers provided for the guest OS
If you're using VMWare Workstation, you can leverage even more out of the environment by installing Visual Studio on the Host PC, and using the Guest VM for debugging, if your application crashes you can actually rewind back to before the crash and step through your code with the same heap and stack before it crashed!
Basically, I suggest going with VMWare Workstation. It's pretty cheap (assuming you get paid to program) and has many, many awesome features that you'll come to love. If you're a hobbyist/student programmer however, you'll likely find VirtualBox to be a little more functional than the free VMWare Player.
As far as performance goes, Intel and AMD both have shipped chips with hardware virtualization since 2005/2006 respectively. This is called VT-x or AMD-V, and often has to be enabled in the bios on older machines.
Basically this means that your BIOS handles Memory and I/O virtualization on this chip, while specialist drivers (e.g. VMWare Tools) are installed to improve graphics and mouse performance - effectively this means the resulting VM has near native performance with minimal overhead.
Hope that helps!
You can work with a VS2010/Windows virtualized environment with no problems.
I've worked with such combination and I had no problems. Both VMWare and VirtualBox are stable so far since years and Windows OS virtualization works properly.
Obviously, you can have performance loss, because a virtualized OS has more bottle necked access to resources than a host one, but current CPUs from Intel and AMD have advanced virtualization instruction extensions which accelerates virtualization operations.
So... Just go ahead!
I don't know your requirement but there is also a great alternative using Win 7.
You can create a vhd file and boot on the vhd file.
A few steps more, you can create a base vhd file with everything you need, mark it as readonly and create as many differential disk as you want.
The drawback of this method are these ones :
it's a bit tricky to create the base and diff disk, because you have to do it in the setup console of windows setup (but google can help you)
there is a small performance impact on the disk I/O (but lower than the visualization environment)
you can run only one system at a time. In fact, nothing disallow you to install a virtualization software
you can't have your "host" and it's potential tools (corporate email, etc.)
but at least, the performance will be greatly better than a virtualization software.
After having had a dev PC HD corrupt, I'm considering the idea of making my development environment be fully Virtual PC based.
The core items would be:
- XP Pro 32
- IIS
- VS2003
- VS2008
- SQL Server 2005
- Office 2003
Primary source would reside on a server in SVN with only a clocal copy on the VPC.
This would be for Windows based web and desktop development.
Assuming that the host machine has decent performance and provides for hardware virtualization, are there any known gotchas with such a setup, ie main pros and cons. Any performance issues or other issues that make this a good or bad idea?
I'd like to go this route so I can create a full backup VPC that can be put on a new PC if one fails and is repalced or copied to a laptop as needed for offsite work, etc. With the new Virtual PC features of Win7 this seems like it may be even better goign forward too.
Would like to get some feedback on this before we go down that road...
I wouldn't recommend Virtual PC because the performance is pretty disappointing compared to VMWare.
I've used a virtual development machine inside VMWare Workstation and VMWare Fusion on Mac for quite a while, and it works very well. It feels as if you're running on a dedicated machine.
My recommendations are:
Use a 64-bit OS as your host OS (Vista x64, Windows 7 64-bit, Mac OS X Leopord)
Have at least 6GB of RAM on your physical machine
Allocate 3GB of RAM to your VM for 32-bit, or more for a 64-bit guest OS
Pre-allocate the diskspace for your guest OS (no auto-grow)
Another advantage is that you can take your VM from a Windows-based VMWare Workstation to a Mac-based VMWare Fusion (and the other way around) without any problems.
I have been running multiple virtual development environments in MS Virtual PC and Virtualbox for 2 years now. I am doing mostly asp.net applications, some of the solutions are relatively large and use large databases which I also run inside the VM.
My observations based on this:
It is a good idea for exactly the reasons you mention and it works fine. Go for it!
768 megs of ram for the VM is enough, but more is better.
Have a Multi-core CPU.
Install the virtual machine additions for the guest OS. (This is basically like installing the proper drivers for your "virtual" hardware, and seems to be more important for performance than having hardware virtualisation support).
If possible, have the VM disk image on
a separate physical disk from the
host OS.
Use Virtualbox. It's free, and being developed rapidly. It might already be the best.
If you can satisfy the above, performance is no issue. Multiple Visual studio instances, IIS, SQL, Office, works just fine.
Running multiple copies of the same guest OS when it is a member of a domain/AD is tricky. If you need to do this you should read up on the sysprep.exe tool. Basically you can't just make a copy of the virtual disk, you need to take some special precautions.
Virtual PC is very convenient and it was what I used for starters, but I have to say that virtualbox seems to have overtaken it now. It was a bit rough in the beginning but the last few versions have really gotten there.
Virtualbox is fully free, and it has better features than VPC2007 - the main one that made me switch was the support for high resolutions. Virtualbox runs fullscreen on my 1920x1080 no problem.
It can also run virtual PC images, so switching was just a matter of installing virtualbox and adding my existing virtual PC disks to it.
An added benefit is that I can run the virtual images just as easily on my new mac as on the old pc.
The commercial options are not (anymore) worth what they cost, IMHO.
One thing you might have to consider is the lack of support for multiple monitors within the VM. I really like using multiple monitors, one for my source, the rest for all the rest. As far as I know, this is not possible in Virtual PC. Aside from that I can't think of anything that should hold you back, it's something I have been considering as well.
Regards,
Sebastiaan
VirtualBox from Sun is also a good choice. I am writing this from a Vista laptop with a virtualised Ubuntu dev environment.
One thing that Virtual Box is great for is having a seamless mode in which the guest OS application windows are presented as just windows on the host system, with a single common background (you get 2 status bars - one for Windows and one for Linux).
The Z-orders don't interpolate (ie all guest windows appear on the same Z plane in the host Window system, with their own Z-order within that plane) which can make it a bit odd, but you get used to it.
It is particularly useful if you need to build across many environments. VirtualBox is getting better and I now have an OpenSolaris environment and a FreeBSD one as well.
It is free as in beer which can be handy.
I actually run three development environments (and many test environments) under Ubuntu host in Windows guest virtual machines - it's very good for keeping things separated and for being able to restore test environments to a known point. It's also handy since the backup is a simple directory copy on the host and you don't have to worry about recovering settings or re-installing applications. etc.
I prefer VMWare over Virtual PC for both performance and usability (keep in mind that's my opinion). You don't need the VMWare Workstation product to create a VM - check out EasyVMX here for a way to create easy VMs.
The one thing you'll miss though is VMWare tools which only comes with the Workstation product, not the player. But VMWare has this for download here - I'm unsure of the legality of this even though it's an official download from VMWare, you may only be able to use it if you have the paid product.
I actually have a license for Workstation, it's just an earlier version and I prefer the latest Player.