VirtualBox

[MartinD]

Has anyone considered offering it?

It's pretty easy to get up and running from a provider point of view so it would only be the logistics of offering it. Not a lot of point, you might say, but what about people who've been running vbox at home on their own machines but would like access to it from multiple places or need their VE to have better Internet resources?

Was just a thought that's been running through my brain for a while now.

 

[Nett]

I use it on my Mac with Windows and Linux installed as guest, you can get things up and running pretty smoothly but there are some configuration (and not easy) required if you'd like networking & IO port forwarding.

 

[Zigara]

What is not easy about VirtualBox networking? It's really straight forward.

VBoxHeadless is actually pretty nice, but I'm not sure it's really designed for large deployments on a single node. Though I've not looked much into it.

 

[wlanboy]

Nice idea.

Would be great to have some of my virtual boxes on the net (bandwidth!).

Transportable containers to switch between my notebook and real servers.

Should be doable on KVM, but perfomance wise it would be better that someone would sell native virtual box instances to avoid the vps in vps scenario.

 

[perennate]

You can easily convert VirtualBox images to qcow2/raw images that can be booted on KVM. Why would separate VirtualBox system be needed to provide this?

 

[DomainBop]

Has anyone considered offering it?

I hope not since VirtualBox is meant to be a desktop virtualization solution.  I would like to see someone offer its big brother OracleVM Server though.

 

[TruvisT]

Anyone for a Hyper-V Cluster?

 

[raindog308]

I hope not since VirtualBox is meant to be a desktop virtualization solution.  I would like to see someone offer its big brother OracleVM Server though.

Why?

I always thought of OracleVM as an "us too" product.  Its chief advantage that I've experienced is that Oracle lets you do subprocessor licensing on its products if they run on OVM.  i.e., if you have a 20-core machine with VMware and create a 1-core VM, you still have to license the entire 20 cores for Oracle DB or any Oracle app.  But if you are using OVM, you can just license the one core.

Beyond that (and the "one throat to choke" if you're running Oracle on top of it), I've not heard of any big advantages but also haven't really looked closely.  

 

[MartinD]

...why not? Why bother having to convert when you can just upload your image file directly?

 

[rmlhhd]

@MartinD


Make some nice KVM deals and we'll try it.

 

[MartinD]

KVM has nothing to do with it - I'm talking about vbox directly


Oh, and we have a few nice KVM deals going just now

 

[perennate]

...why not? Why bother having to convert when you can just upload your image file directly?

I mean, if that's the only issue, I'm pretty sure qemu/kvm can boot from VDI directly.

Is there a particular reason to use VirtualBox over other virtualization platforms in a server environment?

 

[MartinD]

Yes - if someone already has a vbox on their local machine.

 

[eva2000]

Actually would be nice to have.. I already use Virtualbox for Centmin Mod testing i.e. CentOS 7.0 https://community.centminmod.com/threads/centos-7-0-install-on-virtualbox-guest-server.730/

 

[perennate]

Yes - if someone already has a vbox on their local machine.

I mean, you still have to transfer the disk image over, right? And you can boot KVM from VDI just as easily as you can boot a VirtualBox instance from it. Where does the VirtualBox in server environment help?

 

[MartinD]

I mean, you still have to transfer the disk image over, right? And you can boot KVM from VDI just as easily as you can boot a VirtualBox instance from it. Where does the VirtualBox in server environment help?

As Joe Bloggs, the regular PC user with a VDI on their home machine.. they can just upload their VDI and boot straight up, not need to convert or mess around with anything else.

Am I not saying this right?

 

[perennate]

As Joe Bloggs, the regular PC user with a VDI on their home machine.. they can just upload their VDI and boot straight up, not need to convert or mess around with anything else.

Am I not saying this right?

You can say the same for KVM -- upload your VDI and boot straight up, since qemu supports booting from VDI.

 

[Rallias]

I would like to see someone offer its big brother OracleVM Server though.

People do offer VPS's under the same technology OracleVM uses.

Link to a big list.

 

[MartinD]

That's entirely irrelevant.

 

[noosVPS]

VirtualBox is easy to setup and test stuffs on a desktop, but how well does it perform on a server? Especially when 30+ VMs run on it? I would not dare imagine such a scenario because back of my mind I have a feeling that performance will be hit for sure.

With that said, if someone sets it up and starts selling successfully without any performance issues then maybe we have found a new niche there!