At work, my company has provided me with a copy of VMware Workstation. 
(I gather it's quite expensive.) At home, I use a copy of Sun Virtual 
Box (which costs nothing at all). So how do they compare?

Well, they both seem to run Windows and just about every flavour of 
Linux I can find. (Except that OpenSUSE 11.2 does something weird with 
VMware...)

I'm somewhat hampered from making a direct comparison since my home PC 
lacks hardware virtualisation. (I've got the last AMD CPU to *not* 
support this. And to get it, I'd need a new motherboard...) Quite apart 
from the fact that this probably has a performance impact (as if having 
a different CPU didn't do that already), it also apparently means that 
Virtual Box can only run 32-bit software. VMware, on the other hand, 
happily runs 64-bit software, even though I have a 32-bit OS.

(I'm not sure whether the glitch with OpenSUSE is because one is VMware 
and the other is Virtual Box, or whether it's because one is 32-bit and 
one is 64-bit, or what...)

Certainly both VMs seem to run reasonably fast. By contrast, QEMU is 
mind-numbingly slow. As in, when you run an OS with a GUI, you can watch 
it paint the individual screen widgets. It can take 20 minutes to boot 
KNOPPIX, for example. I had assumed that all VM solutions are 
necessarily this slow - which is why I was so astonished at the idea of 
some people running multiple VMs on a mere laptop, not an octa-core 
nitrogen-cooled blade server.

However, unlike QEMU, both VMware and Virtual Box manage to achieve 
almost native speed. In fact, installing the OS is typically *faster* 
than installing on a real machine! (An ISO image on your harddrive has 
faster access times than any known CD drive.)

Virtual Box has several minor details which are nicer than VMware. The 
disk and network activity lights are nicer. (Both VMs fail to include a 
CPU indicator - something which would be seriously useful!) Virtual Box 
opens each VM in a seperate window, while VMware insists on docking the 
VM's display in the main window. This gives Virtual Box several advantages:

- You can close the main window if you're done with it. Then only the VM 
console takes up screen space.

- You can tell the VM to shut down, and go do something else while you 
wait. You can tell when it's actually shut down just by looking at the 
taskbar.

- You can reasonably run several VMs at once. Each one is a seperate 
window which you can easily resize or move around. (In VMware, you have 
to make the main window big enough to handle the largest VM display you 
regularly use. Or set it to auto-resize, in which case it constantly 
jumps around all over the screen.)

On top of that, Virtual Box "knows about" more Linux flavours. And it 
even has cute little icons for each one, so when you start up a Fedora 
VM, a Debian VM and an OpenSUSE VM, you can instantly tell which is which.

And there ends the advantages of Virtual Box (aside from the price, 
obviously). There are several ways in which the products are similar - 
they both have terse, unhelpful documentation, for example. However, 
after using both for some considerable time, the button line is that 
VMware Workstations is MUCH EASIER TO USE.

With VMware, if you want a VM, you click "create VM", give it a name, 
and you're done. It creates a folder and sticks all the files in there. 
You'll never have to worry about it again.

Virtual Box, on the other hand, by default wants to put VMs in one 
place, CD images somewhere else, and HD images in a third place. But 
snapshots go in the folder with the VM. So the first snapshot goes in 
one folder, and all further snapshots go somewhere else...? Wuh?

With VMware, if you want to delete a VM, you click it and select "delete 
VM". And it deletes it. You see that? OK, well, with Virtual Box, you 
apparently cannot do this. You have to manually delete all the snapshots 
first. (??!) And if you accidentally delete them in the wrong order, 
Virtual Box will sit there for 20 minutes "merging" them (an operation 
which can be cancelled in VMware, but not with Virtual Box). Then, once 
you've deleted the VM, you have to manually delete the base HD image as 
well, from a completely seperate window, which you have to manually invoke.

In VMware, if you want to clone a VM, you click on the snapshot you want 
to clone (or the current machine state), and click "clone VM". It asks 
you what you want to call the clone, and then it clones it. Virtual Box 
cannot do this. Apparently the GUI doesn't have a button for cloning; 
you have to use the CLI interface. (??!) And that doesn't clone the VM, 
it just clones the HD image. You have to them manually reimport that and 
set up a VM to attach it to. (Or you could edit the XML file for the VM 
settings I guess...)

Alternatively, you can "export" the VM to OVF format, and then "import" 
it again, but the result is increadibly messy. (Plus, when I tried it, 
my VM broke because the HD's serial number had changed or something...)

Having to install and configure the guest OS twice just because the VM 
software doesn't support cloning properly is *not* my idea of a fun time...

Then there are smaller things. Stuff like... you can't delete a snapshot 
with the VM running. Even if the snapshot is unrelated to what you're 
running. But hey, you can't EDIT THE DESCRIPTION of a snapshot while the 
VM is running either. (??!) And each snapshot must have a unique name. 
(Why?) All of these are pointless, arbitrary limitations which VMware 
does not subject you to.

(VMware, however, arbitrarily makes the snapshot window a model dialog. 
Which means you can't flip between the snapshot window and the VM while 
you edit the snapshot description - this is extremely irritating.)

In short, I can easily see why people would pay money for VMware 
Workstation even though Virtual Box exists. It's just a better product.

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