Very informative. Thanks.

Agreed, very informative. Thanks. I am really curious how MS Virtual PC now measures compared to the other two given the time since the last use. I've tried using VMware Player, which is supposed to be able to use Virtual PC vmc and vhc files, but this resulted in an error message. Perhaps because I'm comfortable with Virtual PC I've continued to use it. Stephen

What about CPU Utilization when both host and guest OSes are idle? That would help me make a choice. Thanks

This is pretty good comparison, but I think it would be more productive to compare apples to apples by putting the free VMware server up against VirtualBox. I am willing to bet that VMware has cut back on some of the performance stats on the free version to try to get people to buy the Workstation or ESX Server.

Also, VirtualBox has some other "enhancements" over VMware since VMware has no seamless mode (at least not in the free version) which I find very useful when running Windows apps on my Ubuntu box.

Good article though, I really liked the charts... pictures are always good...

Under "file system" graph: why is lower transfer speed described as being better?

Why no testing of both SCSI and ATA emulation?

Article was informative but I am still not able to conclude which one is better option.

Can you test latest versions from virtualbox and vmware (from octobre 200?

just a note: Page 4, "VMware installed", the device manager image is wrong, it is the one from virtualbox.

Nice article! Have you considered doing an updated one with the new version of Virtual box now that Host Interface Bridging is built in (at least in the Linux version)?

FWIW, VirtualBox has always "felt" faster on my system & the latest version definitely IS faster than previous versions. I've been running my browser in a virtualbox machine for weeks (to keep the host machine clean) and it works like a charm.

I haven't really even tried vmware for ages and not really thinking to change that situation for a while. And that's because VirtualBox is working so good. I dont know how those performance figures have been measured, but I couldn't say that file system performance on my system was ever slow on Virtual Box. For example Windows Server 2003 sp2 boots up in under 10 seconds when virtualized on my server. But then again it may be that there were no bottlenecks on the host system or perhaps the first version that I installed for my new server was 1.6.x. Nevertheless I have never measured it with any benchmarks because never had any speed issues. The server running virtual machines has Q9300 processor on Intel S3200SHV and 8 gigabytes of ram. Host operation system is 64 bit Ubuntu Server 8.04 that has been slimmed down a bit. Virtual machines are being served from SW raid-5 that has three 750 GB disks. Server is dedicated for virtualized quests and file sharing only.

Mainly I use Virtual Box for heavier programs like Eclipse and NetBeans etc when working on my laptop, because 2 gigs of ram and amd dualcore (and slow io to hd of course) aren't enough for any serious use. Laptop has Windows XP and I use Xming to use X forwarded applications from Linux quests that run on a server. This works as a charm and the applications actually work a lot faster compared to speed that they run on the laptop natively. And they integrate to the desktop seamlessy. Of course situation would be the same for any other virtualization system.

And if I want to use whole desktop from the virtualized machine I can connect to it via Windows' remote desktop, because Virtual Box's own WRDP interface. I'm not sure if other virtualization products have this kind of feature, but it is really helpfull as I can use same machine from any desktop that I have available. And when Remote desktop client is tweaked to send events between 4-10 ms instead of default 100ms, remote machine's UI response is in par with a local desktop. And of course I was almost able to make my friend shit bricks when I connected with windows remote desktop to an ubuntu installation

"VirtualBox looks really really promising especially considering it's free for non-commercial use"

Not true! There are two licences GPL and commercial. If using GPL you can use in any kind of commercial use. But this version has some lack of functionality. But if using commercial license then it can be use free of charge for one user using his/her's own computer. Read the license at www.virtualbox.org

As my Leadtek WalkieTV usb Box does not have 64 bits driver, so I try to use Virtual PC to solve problem. I tried vMware workstation 6.5.1; It was sucessfully installed to 32bit XP, but there was no video streaming - no picture at all - only sound.

Then I tried virtualbox today, everything works fine and normal. And, I find that the xp os starts faster than workstation, especially, to and from saved/paused mode.

About Leadtek WalkieTV ..... mentioned previously:

After some more trying, it is discovered in workstation 6.5.1 the problem comes from the setting of codec - mpeg-2 will not work in playing and capturing; mpeg-4 works.

vmware v6.5.2 for some reason kills permanently my hp deskjet 6980 network printer, the moment i install this crap app, and no efforts whatsoever succeeded in restoring the printer back to life. No such problem with VB.

Of course i have to admit that vmware v6.0.4 i think i previously tried on my older pc did not do anything of the sort, but this sort of thing just puts off so much, i'm probably back to VB now for good.

I find that running virtual box on a system with alot of bottlenecks out performs running vmware.. 1.4 dual core 1meg ram virtual box crushes it for some odd reason.

To solve the bad filesystem performance in virtualbox just switch to SATA mode on the drives. IDE adds some really nasty overhead. The speed difference is like night and day. Also IO APIC should be turned off unless the guest OS isn't working without it. You have to turn this off before installation on some OSes.

The best part is that VirtualBox can use ALSA where in vmware you can hardly get any audio at all on a linux host Seamless mode is pretty nifty too

Just discovered:

Host: W7 x64 Guest: XP x86
In workstation 6.5.3 or 7 RC, when installing vmware tools without SVGA II driver, video problem (if any) may be solved.

Thought I'd share this. It was only today that I tried VirtualBox for the first time. Never really had the time to look into it, but finally decided to give it a shot.

Long story short, I loaded an XP64 Guest from VMWare 7 into VirtualBox 3.1.2. Using SiSoftware Sandra Professional Business 2009, I ran benchmark tests to compare the performance and was AMAZED to find that Virtual Box outperformed VMWare 7 in pretty much every test. I will be running more tests to confirm my findings with different guests, but the results thus far are definitive and I am excited to see the results of more extensive testing.

I encourage others to run their own tests and post their findings.

Thought I'd share this.

Decided to try VirtualBox for the first time today. Long story short, I pulled in an XP64 Guest that I have been using on VmWare 7 into VirtualBox 3.1.2 and ran SiSoftware Sandra Professional Business 2009 benchmark tests to compare performance. I was AMAZED to find VirtualBox outperformed VMWare 7 in every test.

I will be running more extensive tests using other guests, but the results are definitive thus far. I encourage others to test themselves and post their findings.

Personally, i think yre a little biased, because i dont believe that vmware can trump almost evrything in virtualbox, and i cant test it out myself since i aint got no cash to buy vmware. man well if iz better, i feel rather sad. man i pray that one day virtualbox gets better, If iz bad. someone get me a free copy of vmwaare if yall can, so i can test it out

ANONYMOUS: This is an old review. It doesn't now. If you look at the first page of the article there is an updated review of newer versions of both. VirtualBox out performs VMware in some areas now.