VirtualBox Bests Parallels

A few weeks ago my Parallels stopped working.  I’d launch the app and immediately be told it was not responding and to force quit.  I restored Parallels (files, prefs, .hdd) from backup, but no dice.  I had been unhappy with Parallels for a while – it was a resource hog, starting the VM and booting Windows took a solid 5 minutes – so I was ready to replace it instead of fix it.

Parallels was the first big player in virtualization on the Intel Macs and I had been using it for about 2 years.  Craig and others used VMWare, it was serious competition for Paralles and had a better price.  I didn’t want to spend any money on a replacment VM; the $75 for Parallels left me bitter.  I had heard about VirtualBox after Sun Microsystems got involved in the app’s development.  It had a lot buzz in the Linux world and once Sun got involved, VirtualBox was ported to OS X.  Knowing that it was free, too, I decided to use it.

I’ve been running Windows in VirtualBox for about a 3 weeks now and am quite pleased. Besides having a great price, it is fast!  Starting & booting the VM is about 1 minute (I’ve timed it) and it makes great use of resources.  VirtualBox shares a lot of the same features as Paralles or VMWare: guest OS drivers/tools, coherence mode, NAT’ing or Host Interface, shared folders between guest & host, etc.  VirtualBox has the added feature of snapshots, letting you save the current state of the VM to revert to later.  I haven’t used it, probably won’t, but I can see it being useful if running servers in VM or if using as a sandbox.

Setting up Windows in VirtualBox was straight foward, though required some fine tuning to play well in a domain setting.  It’s also not nearly as plug-as-play as VMWare or Paralles when it comes to using USB devices.  For VirtualBox you have to create USB device profiles (when the VM is not running) but I don’t have that many devices, so once I created a couple profiles I was all good.  I do miss being able to drag-&-drop files from the VM desktop to my OS X desktop, like I could do in Parallels, but shared folders is the easy work around.

Overall, I am happy with the performance & price of VirtualBox.  Much happier than I was with Paralles.  I look forward to the continuing development of the app.