Topic: VirtualBox (like VMWare)

[hans]

I just stumbled on this last night doing virtualization research. Apparently the software has just gone GPL. I downloaded it and installed a few OS's and it seems to work pretty well. There are a few features I have to see if I can figure out but it's pretty simple and works pretty well. The networking was a bit tricky for me to get working but once I figured that out I was on my way.
Great for development, or if you want to run two OS's at the same time.

http://www.virtualbox.org/

It gets a thumbs up from me.

[Perspective]

I've heard good things about XEN too (also open source), but you need modified versions of the OSs (there are modified linux distros and a windows build, but I don't know how accessible the windows build is).

I've never heard of that one, I'll have to check that out.

[hans]

I've been researching Xen for my work and that's how I stumbled on this. Xen is more of an integrated solution where this sits ontop of whatever OS you've current got. It can be run on Windows and Linux.
I was reading the manual a bit more and I'm pretty impressed with the abilities, there's some stuff that's not part of the GUI they provide but you can do with their command line tools. e.g. cloning machines so you don't have to keep installing them over and over again. Looks like you can run in a headless mode too.
I wouldn't see this being used in a production setting (other solution would be better I think) but it's quite good for development.

[Perspective]

You should also have a look for virtual appliances. XEN and VMware have a pretty good community for that. They are essentially preconfigured installations of an OS plus a software sweet. It keeps you from repeating the set up work that's commonly done for things like LAMP, or java + tomcat + postgreSQL, etc...

[hans]

Cool.
When I get a Xen system up and running (I partitioned my drive yesterday for it), I'll try a few of them out.

[[stealth]]

That's pretty neat.