Virtualbox and Virtual-PC Compared

• Virtualization on The Technology Muse
• Virtualbox setup
• Ubuntu Linux

I have configured Virtual Machines using VirtualBox, VMWare and Microsoft's Virtual-PC (2010). As such I can make an informed comparison between the methods.

Below is a shot of 2 instances of Karmic Koala and an XP-Mode VM running in 7 Prof 64



This was an experiment to see if I could get Karmic to run in a resolution greater than 800 by 600. To give MS credit, the VirtualGuy (Benjamin Armstrong - Senior Program Manager Lead Windows Virtualization MSFT) he did have a solution that almost worked.

I failed to follow Benjamin's advice:
Please note - I really encourage you to enable undo disks before messing with xorg.conf - as it can be really painful to recover from mistakes if you make them here. Annoyingly, once you make this change - you cannot use the Display widget under Ubuntu to change resolution (it will mess the system up completely).

I did manage to get the MS Virtual-PC to start to run in 1280 by 1024 but then everything went "pear shaped"

Also a note from the VirtualBox help file is relevant to this post and other previous discussions:

"VirtualBox does not require hardware virtualization features to be present. Through sophisticated techniques, VirtualBox virtualizes many guest operating systems entirely in software. This means that you can run virtual machines even on older processors which do not support hardware virtualization."

This answers a question from before whether AMD-V of Intel VT is necessary for virtualization using VirtualBox. In my case it is run on a machine that does have AMD-V (SVM) enabled.
I will post my results of VirtualBox with SVM turned off in BIOS.