# Can Virtualbox be production ready.



## max21 (Sep 8, 2016)

I always read comments that _Virtualbox is not production ready_, but no one yet has presented  a single use-case with a  reason, or two, why.  If so, I have not seen it.

Not having any personal production experience, I have to resort to what most of us use Virtualbox for (on the desktop).  Surely, they mean the host in production is running a few Windows, Linux or FreeBSD versions as guests with various web applications.  Or maybe they referring to having many Virtualbox networking clients and applications servers.  What I figure is that they must be running Windows or Linux as HOST, expecting FreeBSD to run optima as guest in production.  Just like on the desktop, any of these would easily overload this type of visualization on a single machine.

I understand that Virtualbox could be the weakest of virtualization, but under the following scenario, could this make Virtualbox  production ready or acceptable?

To what extent would you figure in comparison to the popular Linux KVM.  Would this be somewhere 25%, 50% or 75% slower?  Or would it be near equal under these circumstances.

1)     A well-tuned FreeBSD-11 HOST.
2)     Virtualbox headless – running in bridge-mode.
3)     A single FreeBSD-11 guest with multiple jails on ZFS.

Would that be production ready?


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## max21 (Sep 9, 2016)

gpatrick said:


> It's been out for something like 8 years and is maintained by Oracle.


Thanks gpatrick, you put lots of things in check for me, and that link is awesome, but I thought the FreeBSD Developers maintain and update Virtualbox for FreeBSD.  Do they not?


gpatrick said:


> Most virtualization will not get bare metal speeds, but that is not always the case.  Joyent claims Windows under KVM on SmartOS is 5 to 10 times faster than Windows on bare metal.  I have no reason to doubt their claims.  That is Windows though.


 That’s how I think.   I believe just because it’s not possible today don’t mean it will be impossible tomorrow.  We all stumbled on a solution by accident and can’t retrace to find what we did.  One dot or comma mis-placed and it’s zoom, zoom, zoom.   I bet someone would have proven it wrong by now if it was not true.

After doing more searching, the main issue with Virtualbox seems to be networking speed.  The NFS share from host and using vbox-shared folder are slow (30-40MB/s).  When 11.0r get here I will not acticate those tools.  My only aim is to use bridge-mode for sake of total isolation of root.  I will not install guest additions.  If I see a speed increase than that will be the key.

I’m not building for networking.  It’ll be used for serving webpages and paying for it will force me to learn and not give up.  If Virtualbox only push 40MB/s handling complicated networking, I wonder if it would be faster simply running as a webserver.  That may increase speed even more.  Might as well give FreeBSD-11 first dibs.

BTW, bhyve look good too.
https://b3n.org/vmware-vs-bhyve-performance-comparison/

The future is bhyve if not now.  I guest vimage can work on bhyve also.  Plain FreeBSD nat to jails is unbeatable in speed but with all these advancements, who needs the INTERNET to touch root anymore when it only cost a few ms to avoid it.  If hackers do get in, they only get to see or rip-up what I choose, and then root will connect to shame them by automatic reporting.  This way I get in on the fun too 

Thanks again gpatrick


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## SirDice (Sep 9, 2016)

max21 said:


> but I thought the FreeBSD Developers maintain and update Virtualbox for FreeBSD. Do they not?


No, they do not. The port maintainer's job is to make sure the port builds and installs on FreeBSD. The actual working of the port is mainly up to Oracle. Although developers and maintainers alike usually report issues upstream, you can too.


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## Ordoban (Sep 9, 2016)

I have used Virtualbox in production environment. It was 5 Windows XP headless clients, hosted on PC-BSD 9.x running on one strong desktop class PC. All XP clients are accessed over RDP, managed over the Virtualbox web-frontend.
This project was started as short time replacement, but has runned over 2 years because this solution has worked very well.
I cannot say many about the performance, because the clients were not under heavy load. I have not got any negative feedback about the performance. I remember remarkable fast client boot times, about 5 seconds from poweron to windows login screen!


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