VirtualBox is fantastic

[Fat_American]

Started an online course (Excel Expert), and had to get Windows (ugh) working. Got a cracked one on TPB, got MS Office, a crack for Office, and am running Windows (ugh) on one monitor of my Linux computer like a motherfucker. Although VirtualBox supports shared folders, I just use dropbox for sharing files between the two systems. It's much easier. The only thing is VirtualBox isn't so great for gaming, but that's obvious I think. Just wanted to recommend this free software.

[Arnox]

But that's the problem. Windows is the best platform for gaming pretty much. Virtualization won't allow you to do that, of course, without a huge hit in performance. So that takes away a large reason to use it to emulate Windows.

[devnull]

Enable 3D graphics support in VB guest extensions , give the machine all but one of the CPU cores and as much RAM as possible, and you will have acceptable gaming/graphics performance. I run Solidworks in a Win 7 guest on my Fedora box and it works well enough.

[Auschwitz Nazi Disneyland]

Everyone in this thread sucks donkey cock for not useing open source software.

[aldra]

virtualbox is open-source you autistic username thief

[Iceman]

virtualbox is open-source you autistic username thief

This.

[LiquidIce]

Yeah, it's a god send for small one tasks like that. I mostly use it only for ievms to check if the project I'm working on works on IE6-11 on either WinXP or Win7. Apart from that, I also use one VM to run untrusted binaries.

Virtualbox can't be used for cloud-like architecture though, right? Been looking at OpenStack and Docker lately and thinking of running 2-3 VMs on one piece of hardware.

[aldra]

it can, but it doesn't have any functionality for auto-scaling and managing large numbers of VMs can be troublesome. you're better off using xen or vmware/vsphere etc.; they tend to have lower per-machine overheads as well.