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VirturalBox vs Fusion et al

F

FortWorthMac

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 29, 2008
708
36
the parched earth of North Texas
Hello all

Just wondering if anyone here has tried the free VM software from Sun called VirturalBox.

They state that it uses less overhead then Fusion and Parallels.

I've got it downloaded and installed and thinking of giving it a try but before I did just thought I'd solicit some firsthand feedback.

Thanks
David
 
flopticalcube said:
I think its great. Runs Windows 7 RC very nicely. The only thing its missing for me is bootcamp compatibility.
Click to expand...

Thanks

Did you have any experience with the others?

I bought Fusion and even with a fast iMac with 4GB of Ram Vista was unbearable! XP ran ok but I gave it up and simply been using my Vista laptop for my few remaining Windows Apps I use.
 
flopticalcube said:
I've used Fusion before with both XP and Vista. It seemed to be the least intrusive before I used VB. I used Parallels a long time ago (18 months?) with XP. Didn't really care for it then but it may have changed since.
Click to expand...

One last question then.

How much Ram did/do allocate to your VM?

I'm installing Windows 7 as I type. So far so good.

Thanks
David
 
I started with Fusion because of the better variety of OS support, I run a lot of Solaris x86 vm's.

I switched to Parallels 4 for Windows, and it I feel Parallels runs Windows faster.

I shied away from VB because of the lack of bridged networking. I need that to run my jumpstart server vm's.

I do like the compressor tools and fusion's disk shrinking on Windows, be nice if they worked on other OS's. The tools to convert physical to virtual work pretty well in Windows as well on both.

Pretty much, if you're doing Windows, whatever floats your boat will work. If you need other OS's, bridging, USB2.0 support, 3D acceleration, etc., check the features and use whichever meets your needs.

My $0.02 worth!

FortWorthMac said:
Hello all

Just wondering if anyone here has tried the free VM software from Sun called VirturalBox.

They state that it uses less overhead then Fusion and Parallels.

I've got it downloaded and installed and thinking of giving it a try but before I did just thought I'd solicit some firsthand feedback.

Thanks
David
Click to expand...
 
Gotta say, VB seems faster.

Granted I am running the RC version of W7 but with only 1GB of Ram.

It boots fast, shuts down fast, and most importantly doesn't bog my Mac down!

I'm impressed so far.

Thanks for the input
David
 
VMWare Fusion FTW... I have it running on my Mac Pro with 2 Cores and 8GB's of RAM for a XP 64 VM... it runs great... but I also have VirtualBox for Linux.. (Sometimes I just have to...) and I think that that runs great even when only given 2GB's...
 
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