If everyday of this new year is like the first, I’ll bet that 2009 is going to change a lot of habits in personal computing.

Today, I updated VirtualBox to the version 2.1.  I must say that I was much surprised when I read in the changelog that experimental support for OpenGL has been added to this release.  WOW!  Virtualized 3D!?  Out of the box?  With no other configuration than installing the updated guest additions?  WOW!

Then I was surprised again: Host networking now works without a bridged interface, without TUN/TAP!  I must say that it took a lot of efforts, many days of trials, to finally configure automatic bridged host interface creation with the needed user rights for several VM running on the same host (I wished that my VM’s started at boot, like any other service).  And now this also comes out of the box!? WOW again!

I believe Sun/Innotek’s engineers have hired Popeye or ate a lot of spinash-for-their-mind during the last 6 months of 2008 (hum, in fact I don’t really believe this, but… why not?).

If these two functionalities prove to be stable and working, the final last two ones I’ll need for virtualization is more user-friendly USB support and correct sound support for PulseAudio, which is very scratchy on my PC.  I’m convinced that PulseAudio has a better design that ALSA or OSS, but it still isn’t satisfying when used with VirtualBox. (Yes, I know there are still a lot of features to improve or to add, but to be honest, these are not the ones I need at this time.)

Here is how I use VirtualBox:

On my desktop PC:

• Virtualization of Windows.  I try to avoid to use Windows, especially because of two reasons: it’s not free and very vulnerable to viruses.  So I installed it in a VM.  Having only Linux, I miss some games running only on Windows.
• Virtualization for new OSes which I’d like to test.

On my server:

• Separation of concerns: each different kind of server software is installed in a different VM, so if one proves to be unstable or vulnerable to attacks, others are kept untouched.
• Decoupling services from the host server.  This permits me to keep my infrastructure unchanged when I update or change the OS of the host server.
• Creation of two network zones (internal and DMZ).

I’ll first try this new version of VirtualBox on my desktop, and after everything is fine, I’ll put it on the server.

Let’s mention that all my appliances (server, desktop and laptops), are run with openSUSE 11 and 11.1.

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…Some days (3) have passed now during which I could test the changes in VirtualBox 2.1.

• OpenGL works well most of the time, but is still unstable, on a Windows Vista guest and openSUSE 11.1 host with ATI GPU.  Good news.  Note that I tried OpenGL with the Really Slick Screensavers, and that some made the virtual machine crash, although others work quite fine.

• Host networking works out of the box.  Very good news.  Here I have nothing special to say, it does all I want, and configuration is really simple: you only have to say that you want host networking instead of NAT.  It’s very comfortable to remove all complicated configuration while still yielding the same results.  Especially when several VMs are running on the same host.

VirtualBox engineers hold their promises, they do nothing more, but they do it well.  What the changelog says is effectively what you get.  I’ll finally be able to run a Linux host and still to be able to play 3D games without dualbooting.

From my end-user point of view, I can say that this year begins quite well, and I wish you the same.

Have a happy new year!