VirtualBox-1.6.2 now installs without error on my 2x 3GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Mac Pro. I’m currently running three simultaneous guest operating systems (XP, OpenSolaris, OpenSuSE 10.3 (11.0 is almost ready!)). Boot installs from CD/DVDs or ISO images. Sound works in all tested VMs and all appear to run crazy fast. No stability issues detected – this would be deadly in a VM environment. Everything works as advertised. May try a Vista install, if I can think of a compelling reason.

I am planning to build a virtual ROCKS cluster by network booting xVM drones to an xVM head-node. I’ll let you know how that goes. On a related note, there is an Open Source project to integrate xVM into the ROCKS cluster distribution. This will:

… allow Sun xVM Ops Center users to provision the entire HPC software stack to cluster compute nodes with little or no administration via a mechanism called Rolls. Rolls are a collection of packages and configuration details that modularly plug into the base Rocks distribution.

This project is of particular interest as it will allow me to create and destroy virtual cluster configurations as needed. Given enough memory, it would be interesting to simulate the entire environment. No more running down to the data center to do the power-up dance with DVDs.

While I’ll continue to push the limits, xVM will likely become a daily workhorse for XP emulation and IE site testing. This is the reason I run Parallels on my MBP for Visio, billing, and CRM applications.

I’m trying to decide if I can use xVM every time I need a ‘bug in a jar’. What do you use?

(See also: OpenxVM.org)
(See also: ROCKS clusters)
(See also: OPS Center ROCKS group)
(See also: xVM OPS Center 1.1 in a VirtualBox)

(See also: Parallels.com)