Virtualization: Oh, how I love thou!

emontero — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 13:00:53 +0000

I bought a copy of Windows XP Professional SP2 a while ago (thanks to a very inexpensive price obtained through RIT’s IT department). I did not install Windows on my Mac right away because, well, following all the steps to install XP using Boot Camp seemed a great deal too many for me. I knew virtualization would be a nice fit. However, being a graduate student with an on-campus job made the prospect of buying Parallels a little bit daunting.

My dear friend Enmanuel, knowing full well that I possess an unhealthy obsession towards all things IT, directed my attention towards the totally free, completely open source VirtualBox VM. Here’s the description that greets visitors at the tool’s web site:

VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See “About VirtualBox” for an introduction.

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD.

After downloading and installing VirtualBox, I was running Windows within 40 minutes. The installation was a breeze (i.e. downright simple). Here’s a screenshot for your reference (click on the picture for a higher resolution):

Needless to say, you need a powerful enough computer. My 2-GB-of-RAM, 2.4-GHz-Intel-Core-Duo laptop handles itself very nicely with both Windows and several other memory-devourer applications running at the same time.

I can finally run Chessbase’s client in Leopard! That makes me very, very happy.

Elvis Montero » Virtualization

Virtualization: Oh, how I love thou!