I also use VirtualBox having also tried Microsoft's Virtual PC and VMWare Server. I found VirtualBox to perform particularly well compared to the other two and also seems less complex than VMWare, which I didn't manage to get networked properly despite several hours of trying.

Host based networking got broken in version 1.6.0, but it now appears to be fixed in version 1.6.1. I've got two VMs, one connected to the domain controller here and thus able to sit on the network, and one that is not part of the domain but can still share folders, and thus network shares, on my machine.

I've found performance to be surprisingly good. Almost indistinguishable from my main machine, in fact. Interestingly, I noticed it actually performs better if you turn OFF VT-x/AMD-V (CPU virtulization extensions); others have found this too.

Overall I have had surprisingly few problems apart from the networking issue noted above. One difficulty I did have was in transferring the VM from my machine to a laptop. The guest wouldn't boot on the laptop until I had merged down all of my snapshots. I also had a problem where I merged a snapshot and it wouldn't start, so I had to merge again, thus losing an intermediate snapshot, which I'd rather have not lost, but it didn't do any harm. Seems like the snapshot facility may be a bit buggy when it comes to merging. They should also rename the facility to merge to something more intuitive than "Discard Current Snapshot and State." Their choice of wording sounds a bit, uh, dangerous, to say the least.

It would also be good if it supported multi-core CPUs, seeing as SQL Server 2005 supports parallelism.

Seamless mode is pretty cool. I find it fairly useful being able to run apps within the VM side-by-side with desktop apps. I've been testing Recorder 6.13 like this. (see screenshot of R6.10 running "alongside" R6.13)

What I really love is the way you can setup your server and, if you have a hardware failure, just spin up your .vdi on another machine. Makes upgrading and maintaining servers so much less painful.

Overall a pretty good experience so far, bar a few bumps.

Hi Charles and John,

Thanks very much for sharing your experiences. I'm blown away by the performance of the VM and, as you say, it's benefit in using it for off-line copies of Recorder 6  is very valuable. John, pleased to hear of your use of VMs with Recorder 6 server and I note your comments about the install. I'll give it a go with the next Recorder version update before I put it into into production use here.

My only gripe with Virtualbox (under Linux at least) is that host networking requires setting up a bridge and tap to the host's Ethernet - but that only needs to be written as  a shell script and started at boot time. I bought Parallels Workstation 2.2 and so far it's not ran with much stability.

Cheers.

(Edited for typos)