Sun's VirtualBox is a relatively new player that has arrived on the desktop virtualization scene recently. A friend of mine prodded me to try it, saying it's just as good as VMware, and has the very attractive price tag of "free."
Since I'm always looking at new options to improve our infrastructure and use virtualization where appropriate, I decided to give VirtualBox a whirl this past weekend.
I tried VirtualBox 1.6.4 on the Mac. Installation was very straightforward.
Creating a VM is much like VMware, with a few notable differences:
- In VMware, a virtual machine is a directory that consists of the hard drive image and other metadata. In VirtualBox, hard drive images (.vdi files in VirtualBox terminology) are stored separately from the virtual machine metadata.
- VirtualBox allows only up to 4 network interfaces.
- As far as I can tell, VirtualBox only allows the network interfaces to be NAT'ed; VMware allows you to have host-only and bridged networking in addition to NAT.
OpenBSD as a VirtualBox
My intent was to install OpenBSD on VirtualBox, which looks like it's officially supported (VirtualBox even shows a Blowfish icon when you choose OpenBSD):
I tried installing the August 21 snapshot of OpenBSD (a post OpenBSD 4.4 snapshot). It all went very well, until a point when the OpenBSD installer suddenly bailed with this error:
uid 0 on /: file system full
/: write failed, file system is full
I was sure my file system wasn't full, because I gave it 4GB of space. And if any OS is lean and mean, it's OpenBSD. Thinking that it was an OpenBSD snapshot issue, I tried installing an older and more stable version of OpenBSD, but encountered the same error.
Any self-respecting geek knows that all answers in life are found on Google. So I googled and found that this was a VirtualBox bug that has been around since VirtualBox 1.3.6.
That's pretty much a show stopping bug for me, since I really need VirtualBox to virtualize OpenBSD.
On another try, VirtualBox threw a really weird error where it thought that my virtual hard drive size was 4,294,970,551 MB -- that's 4 petabytes, which ought to be enough for everybody (yet another reason you should get a Mac -- gigabytes and terabytes are so last century).
Legalese
Another observation: There are actually two editions of VirtualBox -- the regular version and the Open Source Edition. I probably shouldn't comment on this, since this is Ben Yarbrough territory, but I'll wade into it anyway.
The VirtualBox version I tried was the regular version, which uses the VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation License. According to the Licensing FAQ, "personal use is when you install the product on one or more PCs yourself and you make use of it (or even your friend, sister and grandmother)." If you start installing it over a certain threshold (like "500 desktops in your company"), it's no longer personal use and you'll have to pay up.
This restricts my ability to run it in corporate settings (not that we have 500 desktops), but I understand that it's Sun's software and they can choose to license it however they want.
The open source edition is GPL'ed and does not have those restrictions. But there's a catch: unlike the regular version which comes in binary form, the open source edition only comes in source form and you'll have to build it yourself. Given that the size of my current TODO list rivals the size of Bill Gates' bank account (Bill, can we trade?), figuring out how to build VirtualBox is not a likely item that I would want to add to that list right now.
Back to what works
So it looks like it's back to VMware for me (sorry, MH). Not that I have any complaints with VMware, except perhaps that recent ESX licensing fiasco. Given that we use OpenBSD to run very critical applications at Calyptix, like AccessEnforcer, our flagship product, it's extremely important that whatever virtualization software we choose runs OpenBSD very reliably. And VMware has been running OpenBSD without any issues for as long as I've been using it (many years).
VirtualBox does look promising, but it's currently too buggy for my current requirements. I'm sure it runs Windows and Linux very well, but I don't intend to use it for those systems. Maybe I'll give it a spin again in the future, when/if those bugs related to OpenBSD are resolved.
16 comments:
Funny that, because I actually had a similar pb with VMWare and OpenBSD on a Mac. I did manage to install but whenever I want to write some files (tired to install the ports tree), I get "Disk full" error...
I ran into the "disk full" thing also. I used the tried-and-true technique for getting things to work: I went on a hunch. I tried making the disk pre-allocated instead of expand to fit. This means it allocated the entire 3gb file at one time, instead of a disk image that magically grows. It installed fine and everything worked, except not X-windows.
For your use, testing it as a firewall, you may not need the X-windows feature at all.
I want to test it with the new OpenJDK builds to see how that works, and if it would be able to run JBoss, and therefore be an alternative to Linux for us. Unfortunately it looks like OpenJDK isn't in the packages yet, so for me the answer is "not yet, hopefully soon".
Virtual Box supports HOST Only networking... and is a low on memory VM solution.... i have been using it... excellent piece of software...
Tried a standard install of a CentOS a 3-4 months ago and it crashed.
Maybe it is fixed now...
Hey guys, I have the same problem. I was trying to run OpenBSD 4.1,4.2 and 4.3 in the VB 1.6*. I gave the same problem than you (file system is full).
Well, i tried to doing in the new VB 2.0.2, and i gave the same problem. Maybe, Sun won't fix that problem, because this has more than 2 years (well, Sun bought Innotek in this year, ok, but they have to try to fix this problem immediately no?).
I have a box running Fedora 9 (but i tried to doing the same thing in another distro named Arch Linux), and i had the same problem with all the BSD systems that i have here (Free, PC, Net, until a Midnight).
BTW, excuse me if you didn't understand anything about i describe up. My english isn't very good.
Regards from Dominican Republic
cabron10: My guess is it's probably not a priority for Sun to fix it since *perhaps* the percentage of people using VirtualBox to virtualize OpenBSD is very low.
However, given that OpenBSD is supposed to be an officially supported (as I mentioned in the post, they even have the Blowfish icon :D), two years do seem a bit long.
I also tried VB 2 like you and had the same issue. Also, I tried pre-allocating all the disk space as well but that error was still there.
So, sadly, VB doesn't seem like a reliable VM host for OpenBSD right now.
You are absolutely right that fixing this is not a priority for Sun. See reply from Sun employee on this thread: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=6298&sid=8031bbc0f1bb4c92d862fdf3511b333d
I tried with OpenBSD 4.4 and VirtualBox 2.0.6 (last version at this moment) at still the same problem: disk full
set Guest OS to Win98 works for me.
I've seen a segmentation Fault but with no effects. Boot and reboot ok, dmesg clean. Try it !
(VBox on Vista 32bit, OpenBSD 4.4 i386 witch 1GB VBox Disk, installed from openbsd44CD.iso)
OpenBSD runs "well" on VirtualBox 2.1.2, but not the recent release of 2.1.4, which you cannot use the different IP address on the same NIC. I do not have the problem of "disk is full" at the moment, because I have not download anything except ports. It looks well right now because I use it as a penetration tools for checking my network. Of course it does have the problem in supporting Xorg. My advice is: If you want to use Xorg and don't want too much of your ram consumed, install Debian GNU/Linux. It requires only 256 MBs RAM and runs seamlessly.
I installed successfully OpenBSD 3.8 (newer version aren't supported yet - there is an information about this in Sun /before in Innotec/ site). But only console is working - I was unable to start X server. Anyway, this is enough to using this system as server.
My problem is that there isn't any OpenBSD host version of VBox.
I also ran into the "disk full" issue while installing OpenBSD 4.5 on VirtualBox 2.2.2 on an XP host.
Installed perfectly on an OS X host - not surpisingly.
I would recommend getting it installed on a linux machine or a Mac (if you have one or can borrow one) and then transfer the VM image over to the Windows machine to run it.
OpenBSD runs fine once it is set up, it appears to be just the installation process that experiences problems.
Good luck!
That's sick. You wrote all of this stuff only to conclude, that it doesn't work? I guess people are expecting more than this. If you can't fix it, file a bug.
VBoxSDL -norawr0 -vm name_of_vm*
*name_of_vm = i.e "OpenBSD"
it's bit slower, but works OK and it's possible to run Xorg too.
To Anonymous who wrote on September 2, 2009:
As I referenced in my post, there is already a 3-year-old bug report filed on this issue. I added my feedback to that bug report; see the note titled "2008-08-23 05:39:45 changed by lawrence".
It looks like as of September 26, 2009, that bug has been closed where the resolution is "wontfix". According to the person who closed the bug, the reason is because the hardware does not support VT-x.
Nonetheless, VMware Fusion virtualizes OpenBSD just fine, while VirtualBox did not at the time I tried it. I need a bulletproof way to virtualize OpenBSD on a Mac, so I will stick with VMware Fusion for now.
I have not tried any of the workarounds suggested by other commenters, but perhaps they will help others who are still trying to get it to work.
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