VirtualBox’s hidden gem!
Today I was doing some work in innotek’s VirtualBox and noticed something new. It now accepts the “vmdk” format. For those of you not in the know, this is the format used by the most popular virtualization software, VMware. After recognizing this I decided to give it a shot and see if it would work. The first system I tried to convert was an Ubuntu Gusty Gibbon server I haven’t used in a long time. I decided on this machine as I knew that Ubuntu is pretty forgiving about hardware and often it can reconfigure itself to run when drivers are missing or changed. To my suprise it booted the system with little to no problems (took a long time).
After such a great success I decided to try a Windows system that I had laying around (and had previously backed up). This time around I wasn’t so lucky. Unfortunately Windows thought that its hardware had been significantly changed and refused to boot. This is probably due to the VMware drivers I had previously installed on the machine. Either way I am sure with a little work the machines could easily be converted to what I now consider a superior virtualization solution. It is important to note that I went back and successfully ran Windows and the Ubuntu machines in VMware.