Difference between VMware Player & Virtual Box

What's the difference between the two?

 

maybe this helps
http://en.onsoftware.com/head-to-head-vmware-player-vs-virtualbox/

 

The following link might be even more helpful since the comparison is current.

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VBox_vs_Others

Thanks.

 

It's amazing just how feature packed Virtualbox is for a free product.

 

It is also amazing how buggy it is.

 

Thanks for the links guys I had a good read. Virtual Box looks like the winner.

Here is what I'm trying to accomplish:

Use Mandriva One with Gnome desktop as a host and use XP in the VB. I can run my old games in XP and then use another snapshot for trying different softwares. Would this work?

 

Only if your games don't depend on heavy graphics......lately,Virtualbox has (limited) support for 3d hardware acceleration,but it's still in it's early stages,and atm,it doesn't use your videocard's original hardware driver,but a virtual 1,which is limited to 128 mb videoram emulation.

 

Thanks , all of you for your replies.

I guess that would leave out Far Cry and Painkiller.

 

You might want to check out bare-metal hypervisors (hosts). They provide better VM (guest) performance than hosts that run as apps (e.g., VMware Player and VirtualBox). There are free versions of bare-metal hypervisors VMware ESXi and Citrix XenServer. You'll need a dedicated PC with hardware virtualization support. Some time ago, I managed to get XenServer running on a low-end gaming PC.

 

Thanks hierophant, I will check it out. How do you know if you have hardware virtualiztion?

 

Most of the latest Intel systems have it enabled by default,but you can check with the "Intel Processor Identification Utility".
If the cpu is capable,but hardware virtualization is not enabled,you have to enable it in your bios.

As for AMD processors,there's this quote from an offical statement:

 

I done some reading on VMware ESXi. I want to see if I understand exactly what this.

It sounds like ESXi is server and you run the VM's inside ESXi. Does that mean your installing ESXi on a clean HD first? I see that that itcan handle larger loads.

Do you guys run security software on these type of programs?

 

VMware ESXi and Citrix XenServer are both operating systems that you install on clean HDs. I don't believe that even dual booting is recommended. Although they're typically run on servers, they will run on some desktops. The last time I checked, XenServer was the most flexible re hardware, and that may have changed.

FWIW, I've been interested in VMs for years, for all the typical reasons. However, both ESXi and XenServer require very-expensive enterprise licenses to allocate more than four cores to a single VM. Given that I'm a data geek who occasionally needs to throw everything I've got at nested queries, that just didn't work for me. And so I'm running Windows Server 2008 x64, and playing with Hyper-V.

 

As I'm an occasional gamer,I use neither 1 of them,because the're bare-metal hypervisors,so real gaming is out of the question if you only have virtual operating systems installed.