| I recently bought a Toshiba nb305-n600 10.1″ netbook with Windows 7 Starter (32bit) on Atom n550, 250GB 5400 rpm disk, & 2GB of physical memory. Well this netbook has thrice the battery life (or more) and half the weight of my old laptop But as a DBA, I would be happier if I can run my VMware VMs on this lightweight lappie!
So coming from a 15″ laptop on Fedora OS, I’ve already installed the tools and all the software I need to be productive on this new machine. And then I’ve copied the VMware files.. then the last to be installed was the VMWare Server 2.0.. |
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the installation went fine. But it took too long and I already had a feeling I’ll encounter performance issues when I start to boot even just one VM. And yes I was correct. Even a Windows XP VM won’t boot. It was just not working… that made me worry if the Atom n550 can’t just handle the virtualization. Or VMware (and its slow web console) was just not right…
Presenting Virtual Box
| So I was already looking for an alternative virtualization software, but it would be nice if I don’t have to build my VMs from scratch.. because it will just take a lot of effort and time to do that. It would be nice if it can instantly read the same VMDK files without much modification (especially on networking/shared storage) and it should be less hassle making it work. Well.. Virtual Box seems to be what I need! It supports the following: After skimming through the documentation and accumulating some web links http://karlarao.tiddlyspot.com/#VirtualBox I’ve installed the Virtual Box, the installation was way faster than VMware and I really like the lightweight interface |
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The next sections will walk you through on how to make use of your existing VMware VMs on Virtual Box.
Just click on them to redirect you to the Wiki page…
VMware to Virtual Box – Single Instance Database on Linux
VMware to Virtual Box – RAC on Linux
VMware to Virtual Box – Windows XP
I can say.. VirtualBox is way faster than VMware on my netbook. I can even run two (2) node RAC! 
I love VirtualBox.
