VirtualBox Upgraded
Sun’s
VirtualBox 2.1 hypervisor
has quietly passed an important milestone in its maturity. The bridged
networking that most VMware folk take for granted in a hypervisor is now
built-in. This makes it much easier to put a VM onto the same network as the
host. Before, VirtualBox required the use of the VBoxManage command to create a
bridged interface for guest provisioning.
Now, it could not be more
seamless. In the case of Windows hosts, the new VirtualBox host interface
networking driver (bound to the adapter) performs this important function. The
prior bridging functionality on Windows hosts implemented a spanning tree
algorithm by using the Windows network bridge, so this is a welcome upgrade for
network administrators. This feature is long overdue for VirtualBox, as the
spanning tree implementation may have put many off at first.
This is big news
for the free hypervisor, as fundamental features are the perfect layup for
bigger solutions. I recently
mentioned
how Sun is positioning their VDI 3.0 product for a strong end-to-end presence,
and VirtualBox is a big part of the solution. The 2.1 release ushered in other
features such as additional 64-bit support and full VMDK and VHD file support,
including snapshot features.
I have always liked VirtualBox, for a
number of reasons. It's free, the installation footprint is small, and the
feature set is in line with the competing products. The networking topic was my
biggest issue, and now that is corrected.
It's good news that this feature has landed in VirtualBox, even if it was late to arrive.
Let me know your thoughts on
VirtualBox if you have used it in any capacity.
Posted by Rick Vanover on 02/17/2009 at 10:27 AM