Technology & Life Related Musings

I like to have some virtual machines to hand for various things and not having used a Mac before I was unsure as to the best virtualization solution.

I’ve had bad experiences with Parallel’s software in the past so the two I tried were VMware Fusion and VirtualBox.

VMware being my choice on my Windows Machines and VirtualBox for Linux.

I decided to install Centos 5 as my new VM.

VirtualBox

I installed the Centos 5 VM without issue and everything is fairly clear and obvious to use.

The only snag I did hit was when I wanted to install the Virtual Box guest additions (to disable pointer capture so it was just like any other window).

The additions don’t run by default, they require gcc and kernel-devel. In Centos I did the following (after fully updating and rebooting):

yum -y install gcc kernel-devel-`uname -r`

The uname -r means that you definitely download the kernel devel files for your kernel, not the newest as that may be newer than your current.

Virtual Box

One nice touch is that you get a realtime update icon in the dock of the virtual machine.

VMware Fusion

VMware being the virtualization giant that it is means that the interface was a little more polished, I did however encounter an issue with the Centos install.

it had trouble finding a valid HDD for the install:

VMware HDD issue

It seems that it’s a peculiarity with VMware fusion that means you need to select Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 when creating the virtual machine rather than just generic red hat linux.

That did cause a nice feature to appear, it has a Linux ‘Quick Install’. All I had to do is give it my required user details and it did the rest for me and jumped straight to the install:

Centos 5 Installing

and now it running successfully (settings window in background):

Centos 5 on VMware

I did also try to install the VMware tools in the Centos vm, of which seemed to install ok but I got nothing nice like no mouse capture. Of course it’s possible that I just haven’t tweaked/enabled that feature.

Conclusion

All in all they’re both good virtualization packages with slightly different feature sets. Considering that VMware Fusion isn’t free like virtualBox and some of it’s ‘features’ can sometimes cause confusion or issues I would say that for lightweight virtualization virtualBox is the best for ease of use and cost on any of the big three operating systems.

If you’re going to do anything more complex then you’ll want VMware but you won’t be doing that on a Mac.