I did a test for VMWare player verses Virtualbox and its no competition, VMWare is hands down a lot faster especially on anything GUI. I like what Virtualbox gives us but the performance is a problem.
I noticed the same thing. VMWare (at least in my experience) runs a GUI in Unity mode at pretty much the same speed as native for xubuntu guests. I/O performance over shared folders is really good in VMWare too.
The only problem is VMWare has abandoned Linux guests in Unity mode for newer releases of VMWare, which likely means you'll be stuck on 7.x and running older guest versions until the end of time.
For me, VirtualBox's deal breakers are:
- VBox doesn't support dual monitors in seamless mode while VMWare does.
- VBox is not capable of running another 64bit OS inside of itself through virtualization, so using Vagrant inside of VBox is not happening. VMWare does not have this limitation.
VMware seems to have mostly abandoned Workstation. The team was fired. They even encourage you to no longer use their actually-working binary tools, instead telling you to use the often-broken-it-seems open source versions.
Fortunately for Windows hosts, the new Linux personality for NT might be good enough for dev work.
Still sucks for people that want to use VMs in a more serious way.
> VMware seems to have mostly abandoned Workstation.
There were just updates for Workstation[1] and Player[2] less than two months ago.
> The team was fired.
The team was replaced, and not simply to do only maintenance patches: "They’ve got a great surprise lined up for Q3, something very interesting for Q4, and something very big for H1."[3]
[N.B. I work for VMware, though not in End User Computing]
Can you give any insight on the future of Linux guests on Windows hosts using the free Player version?
I just want to be able to run xubuntu 16.x (and newer when it comes out) in Unity mode without issues but from what I read only 14.x works because none of the guest tooling has been updated.
It's a pity that this use case seems to have put on the back burner. This type of set up is the only way for a lot of people to work without resorting to buying 2 computers or dual booting.
> I just want to be able to run xubuntu 16.x (and newer when it comes out) in Unity mode
Apparently Workstation 12 removed Unity mode for Linux guests because it was rarely used[1] - I'm just speculating (I don't work in End User Computing) but I imagine that was based on Customer Experience Improvement Program (a.k.a. telemetry) data (I know some people prefer to opt-out of participating but the information is useful, we just implemented it in the product I work on and we're looking forward to being able to make better decisions about feature/bug priority based on it).
If you'd like to provide feedback on Unity support for Linux you might want to tweet to the Workstation team @vmw_workstation (and/or perhaps their PM, @mikeroysoft).
This 7 year old comment disturbs me: "A lot of work for questionable usefulness. Definitely very low on our priority list.".
This looks like a clear case where the people developing the product don't actually use it in real life. As a developer and ops person I would say this is very likely the highest priority thing right now because it makes their product unusable for anyone who needs to spin up a VM within their Linux based dev VM.
I agree on the speed, VMWare has performed faster, at least for me. I like the price of VirtualBox, its size, and easy install. VMWare seems to install more things (it is heavier).
The only problem is VMWare has abandoned Linux guests in Unity mode for newer releases of VMWare, which likely means you'll be stuck on 7.x and running older guest versions until the end of time.
For me, VirtualBox's deal breakers are:
- VBox doesn't support dual monitors in seamless mode while VMWare does.
- VBox is not capable of running another 64bit OS inside of itself through virtualization, so using Vagrant inside of VBox is not happening. VMWare does not have this limitation.