Re: Supported VM environments under MacOS dom0

[Mike Bowie <mbowie%buzmo.com@localhost>]

On 4/26/10 3:17 PM, Giles Lean wrote:
> My experience of OS X virtualisation products for use with the *BSDs has
> not been happy.  Linux and Windows seem safest; step outside those two
> (or even use less common variants of those two) and you're in a world of
> pain on OS X.
>    
Since moving to OS X I've actually been really satisfied with 
virtualization... besides a minor issue here and there, it's been very 
good for me.  My worst case scenario has been rolling back a minor 
version of VirtualBox, which isn't at all painful.  TBH, I was using 
VMware Fusion exclusively until about four months ago when I found that 
VirtualBox's performance was streets ahead of Fusion for my purposes... 
so now I only use Fusion for the legacy VM's I have already.
> I completely concur with Thor about Parallels: forget both versions 4
> and 5.
>    
I remember beta-testing Parallels a few years back, possibly for their 
v4 release and found that (at the time) qemu was much more stable and 
gave me better performance.
> My best success was with VirtualBox (although it didn't like 64 bit
> FreeBSD, from memory) and as Mike Bowie recommended I'd go for NAT or
> host only networking: when I was using bridged networking I saw strange
> network errors and machines (real machines, not VMs) were falling off
> the network.  Turning off TCP checksum offload and setting up various
> cron jobs to run ping from time to time helped, but what a kludge ...
>    
Besides the Ethernet bridging issue, I have Windows (2000, XP, 2k3 R2), 
FreeBSD (4.x+) and NetBSD (5.0+) VM's running very well under 
VirtualBox.  Some with multiple processors, a good mix of i386 vs amd64 
and up to 3584MB (aka the max offered in my options) of RAM.  I know 
there are issues with non-VT enabled hosts for NetBSD... and that there 
were problems installing with earlier VirtualBox versions, but I've not 
encountered said problems.
> I know the general recommendation (other than Virtual Box) is for VMware
> Fusion, but note that it doesn't claim support for NetBSD, and while I'm
> willing to believe what they _do_ claim support will likely work (unlike
> the other clowns' marketing claims) I'd be very very wary about trying
> an unsupported OS: reports I've seen around the 'Net are not
> encouraging.
>
>    
I always found VMware's "ignorance" of BSD platforms to be 
frustrating... but that said, they've always "Just Worked(tm)" for me as 
an "Other" OS.  Again, VirtualBox's performance against identical Fusion 
VM's was enough to sway me.  (And the cost of migration didn't hurt either!)

Obviously people's use cases tend to vary by individual, but overall I'm 
pleased with both the options (VMware, qemu, VirtualBox, Parallels) and 
the outcome of virtualization for OS X.

HTH,

Mike.