last edited 2009/03/23 20:28 (
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I require to test some of my web-sites with IE6 and IE7, unfortunately. For that reason I began to use open source
VirtualBox.org (2.1.4), and compared it with the trial version of
VMWare Fusion (2.0.2) for MacOSX:
Fast install, WindowsXP SP2 CD I have is for corporate installs, no enter of serial - once installed (apprx. 20min) it boots, and I upgrade from IE6 to IE7. I duplicate the disks beforehand using VBoxManage, just
cp the .vmdk doesn't work, you require to use that helper program.
I booted the guest system with Kubuntu 8.1 (Linux) a few times, after 4 days, the VirtualBox guest didn't boot anymore, not even the BIOS splash screen showed up, blank guest screen. I had to . . . reboot the host machine, then the Virtual Box worked again - not really convincing. As I found out, and pointed out, VirtualBox on MacOSX as host seems a bit behind stability of VirtualBox Linux host.
Install goes not as seamless as with VBox, I end up entering the serial by hand, finally it booted into XP.
It appears faster, has nice feature of "Unity" where the root window of the desktop of Windows XP is hidden, and the application window of IE6 or FF3 appear as application window on the MacOSX desktop, nice feature I thought. But after 1-2 hours using it, the virtual machine became slower and slower, in particular when I started two VMware instances, one IE6 and another with IE7, it slowed down the host machine so much, it almost became unuseable and unresponsive, while
top didn't reveal who the culprit was, no huge cpu load neither swap busyness. That wasn't convincing, so I dropped VMware Fusion.
Site Note: vmware.com is one of the worst web-sites I discovered the last months or years, the site is full of links leading "404 - page not found", and uses third party web-sites, like for feedback, which do not work, incredible. High end virtualization software, but a bad web-site to sell it . . . incredible.