Which OS is the best for installing virtual box?

Hello,
I want to change my OS because I need to install virtual box. But I need an OS that is capable of "bonding" good with VB (away from ram). so what os is best suitable for virtual box?

[icydog]

Naturally, since this is fedoraforum, most of us will probably suggest Fedora. It works well for me. You can get VirtualBox-OSE 3.0.10 (lacks USB support and some other random stuff that the closed-source one has) from rpmfusion, or you can install the rpm from the virtualbox site and it works great.

[scottro]

I'm not sure what you mean by away from RAM. As far as I know, VB will still keep any RAM you give it--that is, if you assign a guest 1GB of RAM, that RAM will not be available to the rest of the system. Also, again, as far as I know--I've only run VBox in Fedora and CentOS--this holds for any system hosting VirtualBox.

I could be wrong on this though, it's possible that it's changed.

[szilagyic]

Fedora (Linux) is an excellent platform for VirtualBox. I run Fedora 10, with a VirtualBox virtual machine that has Windows XP. It is absolutely flawless. The thing that really surprised me is the flawless USB support in VirtualBox. For instance, I am able to use my proprietary scanner drivers for my Epson USB scanner in VirtualBox which give more options than Sane does in Linux, and it's great. Another nice thing is the Seamless mode of VirtualBox, which allows the apps to launch in their own virtual windows from your Linux desktop.

[CSchwangler]

VirtualBox runs very well on Windows and Mac OS X - besides, obviously, Fedora. I currently have it running on Win 7 and Mac OS X. Integration is really nice, for example, you can copy and paste between guest and host. This wasn't even possible in Parallels Desktop (a virtualization solution for the Mac). If I may advise, you shouldn't aim to use the OSE version because of the lack of USB support. USB support comes in handy, for example, if you want to boot from an iso that is stored on a USB stick.

[szilagyic]

There are a couple of other factors to consider, too, depending on your situation.

It might also depend on what hardware you have, to select your main OS. For instance, if you run Windows 7 as your primary OS, you'll need 1 GB of memory to run that, plus whatever memory dedicated to your virtual machine. I like using Linux for the main OS as is uses between 256 - 512 MB of memory, leaving some extra memory to dedicate to the VMs. Plus Linux does an excellent job of utilizing PAE so that you can use more than 4 GB of memory in a 32-bit environment. This is especially useful for running multiple VMs at the same time, if you have more than 4 GB if RAM, and want to stay in a 32-bit environment for compatibility. Windows' implementation of PAE for 32-bit has been crippled for years, and can only use up to 4 GB of memory. You can run 64-bit Windows to get around this issue, but that's a whole other issue.

I think these reasons are why enterprise virtualization products like VMWare ESX are built on the Linux OS (Red Hat Enterprise).

--
Chris

[marcrblevins]

Originally Posted by icydog

Naturally, since this is fedoraforum, most of us will probably suggest Fedora. It works well for me. You can get VirtualBox-OSE 3.0.10 (lacks USB support and some other random stuff that the closed-source one has) from rpmfusion, or you can install the rpm from the virtualbox site and it works great.

VirtualBox let you use your USB ports, thumbdrive etc.

[leftoflexo]

i used to run virtual box on puppy linux 4.1. puppy has a very low footprint. on 512 ram i would run a virtual machine with xp at 384 mb leaving only 128 for puppy. never any problems there. it wouldnt even touch my swap unless i opened nicotine or a web browser at the same time.

[forkbomb]

Originally Posted by szilagyic

Windows' implementation of PAE for 32-bit has been crippled for years, and can only use up to 4 GB of memory.

Can you cite a source on that? I've never had the need to run Windows with PAE (and as I recall the PAE kernels are only available on their more enterprise-driven offerings) but as far as I read the issue isn't that there's a hard ~4GB limit for the whole OS, but that there's always going to be a ~4GB limit per application. That's also a limitation on a 32-bit Linux kernel with PAE as I understand. PAE allows for the kernel to address more memory but applications are typically still assuming standard 32-bit memory addressing. I don't think it's so much that the Windows PAE implementation is crippled so much as that PAE has always been duct tape applied to a non-foreseen problem.

WinXP is a decent enough host for Virtualbox (setting aside uptime issues), but the days of using Windows as a virtualization host are numbered, especially in enterprises. Microsoft seems suddenly incapable of making a non-crippled OS that idles at less than 1GB of memory, and enterprises that are serious about virtualizing usually go with something bare metal or a Linux host.

I think these reasons are why enterprise virtualization products like VMWare ESX are built on the Linux OS (Red Hat Enterprise).

ESX doesn't run on a third-party kernel. It's a bare metal install that runs on its own kernel.

[pete_1967]

Don't waste your breath guys, OP is a spammer.