Am I wrong to give up on Virtual Box after a bad performance on some disaster recovery trial scenarios?

Question

OK, so I began a little journey to move all of my development into virtual machines, and Virtual Box seemed like the best choice to pursue. So I get it installed and install Ubuntu and get my development environment set up, and after some tweaking it works as advertised. Yay, I think to myself, this is GOOD STUFF! But, thankfully, before I got too engrossed in pushing forward with development, I decided to simulate some computer disasters and see if the Virtual Box could handle it and still be reliable. Long story short, I am not impressed. After a few days I started to realize that life with Virtual Box would require constant network setting tweaking, command line maintenance, and manually overriding IP addresses/DNS addresses/Network Adapter settings etc. I did some searching about the network settings stuff, and found tons of posts with people having networking related issues (and no real solutions). Also, the snapshots (which are stored separately from the disk image) are a pain in the ass to use, and a lot of effort and care and command lining needs to be taken to recover the right version of the VM. In the end I decided that it was more trouble than it was worth. Which is sad, because in theory Virtual Box could be a great product. And the very first time you install it and use it, it is great! But if I cannot reliably and consistently recover the VM in the correct state with minimal effort on any computer at any time, its no good to me.

So, can anyone else verify my findings? Or vouch that Virtual Box really does work as intended, and point out what I'm too stupid to realize?

Answer 1

Which version of VirtualBox are you running? If snapshots are a PITA, then maybe you're running a version before 3.1. They added snapshot branching fairly recently (like four months ago, maybe?) which precludes the need for figuring out how to manually copy the image files around. And frankly, if you're doing that, then yes it's a real PITA, and VMWare is way easier.

My biggest beef with VirtualBox is that you can't take a VM and move it, plus its snapshots and branches to another PC. The only method I know of is to export a virtual appliance, and then import it. Although I was relieved to recover my TeamCity installation after a hard disk crash, I was still bummed that I had lost all history of my snapshots up to the point where I exported the virtual appliance.

But overall, I still really like VirtualBox. I haven't had any issues with network settings as you have mentioned.