Anyone tried Vboot from VMLite?

huisinro · 06 Jan 2011

Why not? I work with vbox founder closely, and commit our code changes back.

huisinro · 06 Jan 2011

For example, we are implementing drag and drop feature for vbox, will submit code when finished.

webulator70 · 07 Jan 2011

Holy crap, finally, thank you, this was one of those things that is long over due for VirtualBox.

jimbo45 · 10 Jan 2011

Kari said:

Note

This post represents my personal, subjective opinion based on my own experience. As such, this should not be taken as a software review or as a recommendation not to use this software.

My opinion may be biased due to previous negative experiences with VMlite's software in general.

I have tried.

1. Trying to boot from existing vhd

Following the instructions carefully, I am able to prepare all Windows vhd's to be used with VBoot and add them to VBoot start menu. All Windows vhd's boot OK, until Windows boot screen, and then (without an exception) a BSOD causes PC to reboot back to square 1.

Tested Windows vhd's: XP Pro SP2, XP Pro SP3, Vista Ultimate x86, Vista Ultimate x64, Seven Ultimate x86, Seven Enterprise x86

All mentioned vhd's tested on one laptop (see my specs) and two desktops, one running Seven Ultimate x64 and the other Seven Enterprise x64.

Trying to mount other than Windows vhd's have not worked at all. Here trying to mount Ubuntu 10.04 vhd. VBoot tries to mount the vhd:

Attachment 129626

Until it finally fails, telling that the vhd is write protected (which it is not):

Attachment 129627

This happens with all tested Linux and Solaris Unix vhd's.

2. Trying to create a vhd and install OS using VBoot

Every installation seems to work, this is what I normally got:

Attachment 129628

But after testing, only Windows 7 Enterprise guest vhd was able to boot, which it did completely problem free. Installation of Seven using VBoot command line options took about 15 minutes, plus an additional 7 minutes after first boot to vhd.

All other tries failed, Linux and Windows. The most common reason to fail:

Attachment 129629

So, after an 8 hour test session, I would like to say this is a pretty useless piece of software.

Kari

Hi there
I think apart from the various "dubious legal copyright issues" I posted much the same as this WAY WAY back --at least 18 months ago.

There really isn't any point in using "Cludged" VM software --vbox and vmware work pretty well

Further if you are a REAL glutton for punishment the old QEMU works fine as well. Now who remembers THAT piece of software for creating VM'S.

Before you could use vmware PLAYER to CREATE virtual machines (only possible now with the latest releases) QEMU was used to CREATE a new VM for use with vmware player. Not needed however any more.

VMWARE will allow you also to use "RAW DISKS" too --vbox might as well but I haven't got so much experience with vbox although it seems to be pretty good these days.

I think both VBOX and VMWARE allow various conversions between different vhd formats so booting a VHD should not be too much of a problem whatever software you used in creating the initial VM.

There ARE a few posts around on how to boot an XP MODE VM using vmware but as this involves some tampering with the product ID you are on your own on this one.

XP mode needs at least W7 Pro to run -- using your own XP systems as VM's will run on ANY version of W7 -- even Starter edition but you will need to have a valid RETAIL copy of XP for validation.

Cheers
jimbo

huisinro · 10 Jan 2011

Since some of you totally missed the point of VBoot, I'd like to clarify.

VBoot != VMLite

VBoot is an independent piece of software, and it is NOT virtual machine software. It contains a boot loader and system drivers for Windows and Linux (coming in the future Mac OS X too), so these operating systems can boot on a real physical machine from a virtual disk file. After booting, the os inside the virtual disk file is your host operating system, it's not running as a virtual machine. It's the real and primary os.

This way, it manages your whole OS as a file, you can take snapshot, you can copy and paste this file to another pc, and boot it. For the first time, you can control your host OS as if it's a virtual machine.

Since VBoot uses same disk formats as popular virtual machine software, the same image can also run as a vm. This way, you can operate on the same image, sometimes boot your pc, sometimes run it inside a vm software.

Here are steps to install and boot an XP from a vmdk file:

menuentry "XP VMDK" {
vboot harddisk="(hd0,1)/winxp.vmdk"
}

menuentry "XP Install Step 2" {
vboot harddisk="(hd0,1)/winxp.vmdk" cdrom=(hd0,1)/winxp-sp3.iso boot=harddisk
}

menuentry "XP Install Step 1" {
vboot harddisk="(hd0,1)/winxp.vmdk" floppy=(hd0,1)/vboot/vboot.img cdrom=(hd0,1)/winxp-sp3.iso boot=cdrom
}

You can also boot your pc using Microsoft Windows XP Mode vhd file (needs some efforts to inject necessary mass storage drivers):

menuentry "XP Mode VHD" {
vboot harddisk="(hd0,1)/VMLite XP Mode base.vhd"
}

Simply put, VBoot is unique and no other software can do this in terms of booting physical machines from Linux/Windows from virtual disk files.