Anyone tried VirtualBox as a virtualization platform

[musicmann]

Has anyone heard of VirtualBox and/or used it?  It seems to be a virtualization platform that was created by a company (Innotek...hey, weren't they in the movie "Office Space") that was later acquired by Sun.  http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions

 

The Italian Slackware site, Slacky, has a prebuilt package for it. http://www.slacky.eu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5232&Itemid=56

 

If this is a viable VM solution, such a package might might save a lot of us a lot of hassle trying to get our virtual machines running atop unRAID.

[musicmann]

Looks good at first blush.  I did some digging around about it after stumbling across it.  Finally, I decided to download it and give it a spin on a Windows machine.  Quick download and install.  I booted it up with a CentOS 5.0 image mounted.  Less than an hour after first learning about the product, I had a working CentOS VM...and most of that time wasn't spent installing!

 

I do a lot of my VM work via Remote Desktop, and VirtualBox is much better than the Microsoft solutions and VMware for dealing with mouse tracking via RDP.

 

I'm not sure how well it will work without X, but at this point, I'm willing to look more into it. 

 

I just don't want to strap myself to a protocol that might not make it...

[Gremlin]

Innotek has been behind the scenes in virtualisation for a few years, I believe they actually developed the initial linux extensions for early versions of Microsofts VirtualPC.  I've been using VirtualBox for some time now and find it a great alternative to the other options out there. I'm not sure how the acquisition by Sun earlier this year will effect it's development but hopefully it's a good thing.

[Joe L.]

It is one of the only solutions that is open-source.

 

I've got it installled on my Vista Laptop and it boots up ubuntu linux, slackware, slax... in both command line mode and with X windows desktops.

It is really weird watching "grub" load an OS in a window, but it does.

 

The SLAX image I am booting (based on slackware with a 2.6.24 kernel) supported networking without me having to configure anything.  It could even browse the unRAID network shares.  So far, I like it better than vmware.

 

Joe L.

 

 

[stephenm00]

Fixed

Edited April 21, 2017 by stephenm00

[bubbaQ]

This seems to be a good solution to the issue of a combined unRAID and Windows system.  Running unRAID inside a VM has some important restrictions, such as number of host drives accessible.  VBox is more lightweight than VMWare and seems to be runnable on an unRAID system.

 

Running Vbox on a Slackware/unRAID host so MS Windows can run in a VM solves a number of problems for me, such as some home automation and other "always on" applications that only exist in the Windows world.

 

If your goal is to eliminate the second "always on" box, add Vbox to unRAID, and run WinXP in a VM.

 

 

[musicmann]

Has anyone gotten this working on unraid yet? With a prebuilt package, it should be easy correct? Sorry I am not very knowledgeable with linux.

 

I tried the package last night.  After installation, it requires a few commands to get it running, the first of which is one that recompiles the kernel.  It needs the kernel headers.  Josetann just updated his "unRAID on Hard Drive" to include packaged unRAID kernel headers, so I'll give that a whirl sometime soon.

 

Technically, there are two versions of VirtualBox.  The open-source version and a binary version which is supposed to have some additional functionality.  I don't know what the exact differences are (haven't had the time to look).  I think the "prebuilt" package is the open-source edition. 

[musicmann]

Not much time = not much progress.  I'm trying to get it running directly on a stock unRAID, but I'm hitting a bump when I try to run the setup command.  The kernel source that I have is version -smp, but the kernel is, of course, version -unRAID.  The setup is failing because of the mismatch.  Some research suggests that these are different "version magics," and there a couple of ways to resolve it: force make to ignore it or change the source version magics to that of the running kernel.

 

I took a quick look in the setup script and couldn't find the make directive.  If I could find make, I would try to give it the param --force-vermagic to try to force the compile past this step.  I didn't have enough time to see how to change the version magics on the source.  Also, even though I have source, modules, make, gcc, and headers, I'm getting errors when trying to compile the kernel.  Something's missing, but I don't know what yet...