VirtualBox 2.1.0 Released: A Look at the Mac Version

Just in time for holidays...

VirtualBox 2.1.0

...was released on December 17 for Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. VirtualBox is a free (for personal use) and Open Source virtualization hypervisor that lets you run other operating systems like Microsoft Windows and Linux at the same time as Mac OS X. It does not require a reboot to change operatings systems like Apple's Boot Camp which installs Windows on its on hard disk partition. There's a couple of big feature additions in the jump from version 2.0 to 2.1. Here are the ones I found particularly interesting:

- Support for hardware virtualization. Intel VT-x is available on all Intel based Macs. So, this new feature is available to all Intel Mac users. This should translate to significantly improved performance.

- Support for 64-bit Guest operating systems on 32-bit host operating systems.

- Experimental support for OpenGL 3D acceleration

- New NAT engine for better network performance (when configured for NAT access)

I had problems with Fedora 9 since the VirtualBox 2.0 beta release. So, I decided to delete that Guest OS. It turns out that VirtualBox only deletes the configuration information. Everything else inclluding the multi-gigabyte virtual hard drive file is left alone. So, you need to delete that manually if you really don't want a specific Guest OS.

I wanted to quickly install a new Linux distro for testing. Most of my Linux based work for the past decade was with Red Hat derivaties (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Fedora). But, Red Hat based distros are gigantic these days (nearly a full DVD). So, I opted for the lighter weight (both in download size and hardware resource requirements) Xubuntu based on Ubuntu 8.10.

Xubuntu uses the XFCE X11 windows manager which is much lighter than the Gnome or KDE managers you usually see in on Linux distros. This lets it work in a mere 256MB of RAM. I felt generous and gave Xbuntu a whole 384KB of RAM as well as the 8GB of disk space you see in the screenshot above.

You can see that the Xubuntu ISO file weighs in at 589.5MB and was used for my installation.

One of the things I noticed during this installation is that there is a specific Mac keyboard driver. It may have been in earlier releases but escaped my notice.

VirtualBox 1.5 only supported NAT network access. Direct support for the host interface came wiht the 2.0 release (if I recall correctly). I'm thinking of using this little Xubuntu Guest OS for small MySQL tests. Host Interface support will let MySQL be seen simply by looking at the flat IP address space. The default setting is for NAT access (which makes sense). So, you need to change this setting before booting the Guest OS. You may note that I'm working on a wireless LAN. The default is to point to the wired Ethernet port (which also makes sense). So, I needed to change this manually too.

VT-x/AMD-V hardware virtualation support was disabled. So, this option also needs to be turned on manually before booting a Guest OS.

The first time Xubuntu is started, it comes up in a 800x600 display mode that can't be scaled up for a higher resolution. VirtualBox's Linux Guest Additions need to be installed to get higher resolutions and remove the keyboard capture requirement (toolbar: Devices->Install Guest Additions...). After installing Linux Guest Additions and a quick reboot, my Xubuntu Guest OS came up in a much easier-on-the-eyes 1152x864 window. And, the cursor could be moved between OS X and Xbuntu windows seamlessly.

The Windows 2000 Professional Guest OS I've been using since VirtualBox 1.5 still works fine in the 2.10 release.

VirtualBox has come a long way since the first Mac supported version (1.4.0) was released on June 6, 2007. It is really starting to look like a solid offering in the Mac virtualization hypervisor area. I haven't updated my Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion to the latest versions yet. And, after a quick look at VirtualBox 2.1.0, I wonder if I will need to. It will probably take another couple of weeks of playing with 2.1.0 before I can make that call. But, it looks pretty good so far.