Apr. 11, 2009
Just had the time to install VirtualBox 2.2.0 on my Mac and I am looking forward to testing the new host-only mode which made it into this release. This is something I have been using for quite a while in order to setup a number of systems on isolated networks by using loopback tun-devices. The new host-only mode should make this so much easier without the hassle of setting up dhcp etc. on the host system.
Some other cool features also made it into the release such as:
- OVF (Open Virtualization Format) appliance import and export
- OpenGL 3D acceleration for Linux and Solaris guests
The complete Changelog is here http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog
Posted by patrik in Virtualization | No Comments
Apr. 4, 2009
So, I recently got myself a MacBook. So far I have been impressed with lot’s of things! And then there some stuff that I obviously have been less impressed with. One of these things has been the migration from the Linux version to the Mac OS X of VirtualBox 2.1.4. Maybe I was naive to start with, thinking that hey VirtualBox exists on Linux and it also exists on Mac, then it should be a matter of copying the files over and I should be up and running! Well, well, well it wasn’t quite that simple. Looking back, I could probably have made things a lot easyer by shutting down all machines instead of moving them in their saved state.
Posted by patrik in Virtualization | No Comments
Jan. 22, 2009
So VirtualBox 2.1.2 was released yesterday with some bug fixes and improvements. See the changelog for details.
One little annoying bugglet that was fixed was the clonehd function of VBoxManage. Now the cloned disks do actually work instead of ending up corrupted and unbootable as described here.
Another thing I have been having some issues with, which happens every now and then, is some unexplainable freeze when accessing files and folders on network shares in Vista. The changelog mentions a fix for this problem for Windows 2000 and I am hoping to see less of this problem now.
Another great improvement is that I can now finally run my 1023 guest machines all at the same time, this limit used to be 127 
Posted by patrik in Virtualization | No Comments
Dec. 17, 2008
Once I got all my machines converted I was extremely pleased to see that VirtualBox 2.1 now supports snapshots for vmdk disk images. This has been one of the obstacles remaining for some of my lazy co-workers to convert from VMware to Virtualbox. Before you had to convert your vmdk images to vdi in order to get support for snapshots. Now the VMware images can simply be copied to VirtualBox and off you go!
Posted by patrik in Virtualization | No Comments
Dec. 17, 2008
Being all excited about Virtualbox 2.1 being released today I downloaded and installed it on my Ubuntu laptop. As quite a few changes have been made, including changes to networking, I was not very surprised to see that the configuration files needed to be upgraded by the application. However, I was surprised that 50% of them failed! I tracked the problem down to the machines I am running with custom startup and shutdown scripts for my host interfaces. It seems as the conversion failed to properly convert these machines as these scripts can no longer be used with host interfaces in the application.
According to the changelog:
“New Host Interface Networking implementations for Windows and Linux hosts with easier setup (replaces TUN/TAP on Linux and manual bridging on Windows)”
I saw that the same issue I am having was reported here three hours ago. So if you are seeing a number of machines that fail to convert with the following message, this fix is for you.
“Assertion failed: [!name.isNull()] at ‘/home/vbox/vbox-2.1.0/src/VBox/Main/NetworkAdapterImpl.cpp’ (1068) in nsresult NetworkAdapter::loadSettings(const settings::Key&). Please contact the product vendor!.”
In order to fix the machines reporting this problem you need to:
- Enter the directory of the Machine configuration, in my case the users name is patrik and the machine name is XP which results in the following directory /home/patrik/.VirtualBox/Machines/XP/
- Make a copy/backup of the xml file in this directory and open it with a suitable editor
- Look for any lines containing “<HostInterface TAPSetup” and simply delete it
- If you have Virtualbox running simply press the refresh button of that machine and it should now convert
Obviously, you will need to setup the interface again using the configuration editor.