#VMWARE VS VIRTUALBOX VS VIRTUAL PC PC#

And not just by a few inches - in the case of version 6.5, think several feet.

With each new major release, VMware raises the bar for would-be competitors. But as I mentioned in my preview of the Workstation 6.5 Beta earlier this year, the company simply refuses to sit on its laurels. What is there left to say about VMware Workstation? Few products have spent as much time at the top of the heap. And with Sun pouring its vast engineering resources into VirtualBox (for example, it just gained 64-bit guest OS support), the real race may be to see whether VMware can continue to differentiate Workstation at the high end while VirtualBox slowly eats its lunch among less discriminating customers. VirtualBox's primary claim to fame is that it's free (both as a closed source downloadable and a more limited open source exploitable), and this has made it the choice of anti-establishment types who balk at Workstation's retail price tag. In Lane Two you find Sun xVM VirtualBox, a product Sun acquired from tiny Innotek earlier this year. It truly is the pinnacle of 'kitchen sink' engineering. If there is a bell or whistle VMware missed, I can't spot it. In Lane One you have VMware Workstation, the pedigreed blue blood of desktop virtualization solutions. And in keeping with many such situations - where a single product dominates the high end and everyone else tries to find a viable niche - the two players couldn't be more dissimilar.

#VMWARE VS VIRTUALBOX VS VIRTUAL PC PC#

With Microsoft all but abandoning Virtual PC (no updates in more than a year), and with everyone else focusing on the datacenter (including Microsoft), the field now consists of just VMware Workstation and Sun Microsystems' xVM VirtualBox. A two-horse race: That's how the market for general purpose desktop virtualization packages is shaping up, at least for the foreseeable future.

Vmware vs virtualbox vs virtual pc