VirtualBox is the virtualization tool with one GPL edition, as we speak bellow. It is becaming as an attractive choice against VMware products, with propietary code philosophy. VirtualBox was acquired on 2008 February by SUN Microsystems. We can see in the following link http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions, that we have two VirtualBox Editions:

1. The complete version, released with a special free licence for personal users.
2. The Open Source Edition (OSE), GPL licensed. But without some useful functionalities, like the most interesting for me: boot mi old Windows XP from its partition.

The OSE (Open Source Edition) is at the Ubutu repositories. Install it is as easier as execute the following command:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose

Opposite the 450MB VMWare-Server 2.0 Beta 2 size, with VirtualBox we download thre packages with less than 30MB size:

Se instalarán los siguientes paquetes NUEVOS:  libxalan110 libxerces27 virtualbox-ose
  0 actualizados, 3 se instalarán, 0 para eliminar y 0 no actualizados.
Necesito descargar 8997kB de archivos.
Se utilizarán 29,8MB de espacio de disco adicional después de desempaquetar.

Finally we find the launcher at Applications >System Tools, the non-last version of VirtualBox, la 1.5.6. The complete version can be found at SUN repositories, where you can select your operating system and download the installation package. It will be installed with GDebi, and we can create a launcher where we want with the command VirtualBox. You can see my reference table: Origin http://www.virtualbox.org/ Repository Commercial version aquí GPL version here, but choosing the package for your regular distro Package virtualbox_1.6.0-30421_Ubuntu_hardy_i386.deb Documentation (English) User Manual: http://www.virtualbox.org/download/1.6.0/UserManual.pdf

Vamos a instalar el producto de VMware, compañia pionera en esto de la virtualización. VMware Server es uno de sus productos gratuitos, que genera y maneja contenedores de máquinas virtuales como su hermano de pago VMware Workstation. Pero en este caso la interfaz de administración esta en un navegador web. Lo cual abre posibilidades a crear/eliminar/administrar/utilizar máquinas virtuales con un simple navegador web, teniendo acceso a la máquina host. Lo primero es instalr, si no lo habeis hecho ya, los paquetes básicos para compilar cualquier cosa en Debian. El listado de paquetes esenciales de Debian, y las fuentes de las librerias de linux:

sudo apt-get install buil-essential linux-headers-'uname -r'

Y el paquete xinetd que proporciona un acceso avanzado a las herramientas de red del kernel:

sudo apt-get install xinetd

Vamos a instalar la versión Beta 2 de VMware Server 2.0 por que aunque asumamos riesgos, podemos probar las nuevas funcionalidades. En el enlace de arriba nos podemos descargar el paquete, previo registro, que es necesario por que nos proporcionará un número de serie necesario para activar el producto. Descomprimimos y ejecutamos el paquete de instalación:

sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Después configuramos el paquete:

sudo /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

Y modificamos el usuario con el que vamos a acceder por uno que exista en nuestro sistema en el siguiente fichero:

/etc/vmware/hostd/authorization.xml

Para arrancarlo desde consola tecleamos:

sudo vmware

Y para acceder desde nuestro navegador: http://localhost:8222

We are going to install the VMware's product, the earliest company in the Virtualization issue. VMware Server is one of their free products, it creates and manage virtual machine containers like its payment brother, VMware Workstation. But in this case we find the Administration interface at a web breowser. Then we get the whole possibilities create/erase/administer/use virtual machines from a simple web browser, from any site, having access to the host machine. First we have to install, if you do not do it now, the basic packages to compile every thing on Debian. The list of essential packages, and the linux source libraries:

sudo apt-get install buil-essential linux-headers-'uname -r'

And xinetd package which gives us an advanced access to the kernel networking tools:

sudo apt-get install xinetd

We are going to install the Beta 2 version of VMware Server 2.0 even if we assume some risks, we can test the new features for the next release. At the link bellow we can download the package, registering previously, being necessary because they provide a serial number which is necessary to activate the product. Unzip and execute the installation script:

sudo ./vmware-install.pl

After we will configure the package:

sudo /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

And do not forget modify the user you will access with, writing one which exists in our system in the following file:

/etc/vmware/hostd/authorization.xml

To execute VMware Server from console:

sudo vmware

And, finally, we can access to the platform with our favourite web browser: http://localhost:8222