On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 11:02 PM, Todd And Margo Chester < [email protected]> wrote:
> On 03/30/2012 07:34 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: > >> On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 7:08 AM, Kevin Wood <[email protected] >> <mailto:[email protected]**>> wrote: >> >> I haven't, but just wanted to say that both VirtualBox and VMWare >> Player run fine under SL6.0, and provide a much better user >> experience than KVM. I've run XP and and W7 with no issues using >> VBox and VMWare. >> >> KVM has allegedly gotten better, and with the direct support of our >> favorite upstream vendor it may be a workable enterprise solution. But I >> still find that the built-in management tools for it were designed by >> monkeys actually trying to write Hamlet. >> > > Hi Nico, > > There is truth in what you say. Things on this front are > getting better all the time. Spice is getting better too. The > rate of development in dizzying too. > > Virtualbox has a *much* cleaner interface for managing a few >> guest environments. >> > > Be careful of Virtual box. It is a toy. It also cost me > my largest customer. I am still really pissed at the way > Oracle treated me and this problem. *It cost me dearly*, > as in tens of thousands of dollars of income: > > https://www.virtualbox.org/**ticket/8478<https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/8478> > > My option and experience: only use Virtual Box as a toy. > No mission critical stuff. > > I use it extensively for kickstart and PXE testing and RPM building. It's a very useful way to get Scientific Linux environments into a Windows based world. When your IT department does Windows installs on desktops, or you want your home machine to stay Windows in order to run games, it's much safer to run VirtualBox on the Windows box to get Linux build or test or running environments. Our favorite upstream vendor's OS virtualizes *very* well under VirtualBox and is a well supported environment. Thus Scientific Linux virtualizes very well and I am a happy camper. I've got half a dozen VirtualBox environments right now on my home box, to retain access to Microsoft based utilities. (i.e., games!). And it's a lot faster to set up VirtualBox on somebody's Windows laptop to get them access to a working Scientific Linux environment than to do the reverse, and the performance is better. I'm using it right now with a locally mirrored copy of the Scientific Linux 4.9 archive for testing backports of Subversion 1.6.x. The interface is *vastly* superior to VMWare's, and easier on my hands. (Hitting right-Ctrl to escape the virtualized window is much easier than hitting Ctrl-Alt!) I suspect part of the reason you had so much trouble is that you were relying on virtualized MSSQL services on top of a Linux server. Virtualizing proprietary database services seems.... fraught with adventure. So, yes, I can see where Virtualbox might not be a good solution there, especially if you're virtualizing multiple CPU environments. (I generally don't, just for safety's sake and to limit resource consumption by virtual environments.)
