VirtualBox.org

One of my co-workers told me about a product called Virtual box about 2months ago, I first looked at the site but never used or tested it.  Since then I got a Mac Book Pro and wanted to run windows on it as well but didn’t not want to pay for Parallels.  I have been wanting to test out vbox on the Mac and finally got to last week.

Requirements:

• Will work on almost any Desktop Platforms (Linux, Windows, OS X, Solaris… )
• Very Small footprint.  ~23MB, compared to VMware being 170MB+ Download.
• The more RAM you have the better off you will be.
• 2Ghz CPU is recommended depending on what the guest OS is.
• Disk Space, the more the better but I recommend 10GB for a XP install.

One of the best features is shown in the screen shot below.

Its called Seamless Mode, you can run Mac OS X apps and windows apps next to each other (or which ever host and guest you are running.)  Right now I have Mac OS X host on a Macbook Pro with XP as the guest.  For most of the Guest OS’s there is a guest additions for drivers and to make it work seamless.  All and all the full install of Virtualbox, guest os (XP), and the additions took less than an hour.

Current Uses

I am using this to test out XP installs and updates like SP3, IE8, and Branded IE7.  One of the other great features you can use it making Snapshots of the current install and revert back to the time you made the snapshot.  It even has the windows and programs running at that time.

I will post more on this great tool later, as I use it and find problems and/or limitations but so far so good!