I use virtualization for a lot of things, but most often I’m using it for developing software.
Until today I had been using VMWare and it did a fairly good job. That said, it does have its short comings, and on mac this includes having network difficulties in your virtual machines. This manifested in a number of ways, sometimes as a message when you started your VM saying something was disabled and that as a result networking would start disconnected, and sometimes if you used ping from the VM, you would see hundreds of duplicate responses and you wouldn’t be able to reach download speeds higher than around 60Kbps.
Well today I finally had enough and switched to something that worked, and it turns out one of alternatives for virtualization on Mac is Virtual Box, which is GPL’d so I didn’t have to look any further. So far it is faster than VMWare, is Free Software, doesn’t suffer from any the bugs that aggravated me in VMWare, and has an easy to use and intuitive interface.
If anyone is familiar with VMWare and the bug that I’m talking about, and knows how to fix it or if it is fixed by the time you read this, drop a line in the comments and let me know. Not that I’d jump at the chance to switch back but it would be nice to know what the fix for that problem is.
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