Update: VirtualBox 2.2.0
As I had mentioned in my last post, I was planning to upgrade from Sun’s VirtualBox 2.1.4 to 2.2.0. You can read my full review of 2.1.4 here. Well, I installed it over the weekend but I have not had much time to play around with it. Although I will say that the upgrade went smooth. Note that this was via rpm installation through Fedora GNU/Linux. The upgrade displayed no obvious problems, so far; not that I really expect any. All my virtual client profiles had to be converted over to a “new” format so that VirtualBox 2.2.0 could play nice with them.
My main objective to testing out 2.2.0 was to find out if there are any improvements in performance; especially when virtualizing OpenSolaris 2008.11. It was kind of hard to tell. I want to say that I noticed a slight improvement but it was not significant enough for me to get excited about. Not too long ago and very briefly I had installed VirtualBox 2.1.4 for Windows XP on a computer at work, it too didn’t perform as well as I had hoped. When I was working with some LiveCDs through it (i.e. Fedora 11 and PuppyLinux) it virtualized the operating systems a little slower than I would have expected. I should see if there has also been improvement there (unless someone beat me to it, then please share your opinions). As I personally do not use Microsoft Windows anymore, this is the least of my concerns. ;-)
Other than the performance of Sun’s OpenSolaris operating system, I am still not disappointed in VirtualBox and continue to use it.
On a side note, my updates have been quite slow recently. I have been spending some time working on a cloud-centric service providing project which I am keeping quiet, at least initially and have been brushing up on my AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML), along with CSS and HTML on top of a postgreSQL and PHP database/query engine. I have also started researching (earlier this morning) jQuery and trying to see the differences or advantages in utilizing it. So my future posts may start focusing on a lot of that.
