This program was recommended to me after my Macbook at work started to struggle with the memory hogging VMware Fusion. Don't get me wrong - I like VMware fusion, and it has a nice interface; but it was so slow. I don't think my Macbook Pro has ever had an VMware Fusion related slowdowns, so it could just be processing power that was the cause of the problem.
Anyway, I decided to give VirtualBox a try; the installation was the usual simple method of dragging and dropping an icon from a DMG into your Applications folder which these days is pretty much what you expect. Once done it does ask you to register your name and email address but you do get the choice to not provide these details.
What I find amazing about the program is it's simplistic design is instantly recognisable as being by Sun Microsystems and that put me off to start with. I don't know what it is about their UI's but I find them horrible, I wish I knew why. The program itself is straight forwards and speedy, and installing a new virtual OS is as simple as clicking new, going through a wizard to decide exactly what you want, and then to boot with either an installation ISO image mounted as a drive, or the installation CD in a mounted drive.
Unlike VMware Fusion it does not automatically do all the installation work for you, it's not that sophisticated. Instead you have to follow the normal installation instructions as though you were installing it on a real machine. For my virtual PC I decided to install Windows XP as I needed access to Internet Explorer 6 for testing purposes. The installation process was exactly the same as if I was installing it on a PC and was really easy.
Another similarity VirtualBox has with VMware Fusion is that you can save snapshots of your machine states so that you can revert to older versions of your machine should any changes cause the OS to go wrong, etc. There are many other common configuration settings such as 3D acceleration, specifying base memory and video memory sizes, clipboard sharing configuration, and remote displays.
For the past few days now I've been running Windows XP from this virtual machine with no serious slow down to my machine, and inside the VM itself it's still pretty responsive despite only allocating 192Mb RAM to it. One thing I've also noted as a useful feature is it's ability to have variable sized HDDs.
For those of you who have used VMware and need to convert your existing images there is documentation on the Ubuntu site on how to do this.
If you're in the market for some new virtual machine software to be run locally then this is a good alternative to try.
