I had an opportunity to test out VirtualBox on a server at work with Fedora Core 6. Due to a hardrive crash our sales system was unable to send pricing to the website.
Whilst trying to build the system from backups I came across problems due to missing libraries which I couldn't resolve using various compatible libraries which I needed for a custom Apache build. I was already aware of VirtualBox and went to check out their website and saw they had a new release 1.5. So I promptly installed it on my newly built Fedore Core 6 server. This concept isn't new.
VMWare Inc. have been offering virtualisation products for quite some time now and are really mature products. However VMWare offer premium products and not suited for casual users.
VirtualBox on the other hand is available as a free product and also an open source community edition.
There are only a few steps to be aware of before installing or running VirtualBox. First up is making sure you have gcc and the kernel sources available. So a quick
yum install gcc and
yum install kernel-devel sorted this out so VirtualBox could do a custom kernel module.
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