
VirtualBox 4.3 released - conductor
https://www.virtualbox.org/pipermail/vbox-announce/2013-October/000100.html
======
mitchellh
A couple important notes about this:

* Vagrant is being updated to work with 4.3 now. A release should be out today or at the latest tomorrow. (UPDATE: Vagrant 1.3.5 is now out and supports VirtualBox 4.3)

* VirtualBox 4.3 doesn't run at all on Mavericks (10.9) because their kernel extensions aren't signed. OS X 10.9 requires signed kexts now. So the changelog where they said "limited" Mavericks support they actually should've said "no support". (UPDATE: Some people are reporting it is working for them on Mavericks. I can't get it to work. YMMV)

Based on these two bullet points, I would stick with VirtualBox 4.2 for the
time being. The bullet point that says "rewritten VT-x and AMD-V code" is
especially vague and could be "super unstable virtual machine manager" just as
easily as it can mean "slight performance improvements." So be careful.

Other than that, it is good to see VirtualBox have some sort of big release.
This is their first major ("4.x") release in over a year.

I also want to note that if you are on Mavericks, VMware Fusion works
perfectly. As a disclaimer to this sentence though: I make money from Vagrant
+ VMware users. I'm not trying to advertise that, I just want to state that
Vagrant _itself_ is fine. VirtualBox 4.3 doesn't work. VirtualBox 4.2 does.
VMware Fusion 5 and 6 does.

~~~
yeukhon
[http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/vmware/known-
issues.html](http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/vmware/known-issues.html)

So this is now the only issue left. If I remember correct there used to be
multiple issues with VMWare + Vagrant. I just checked now and seems only one
left. Correct?

I might actually switch to fusion + vagrant on my mac osx if the support is
stable.

~~~
mafro
I can attest to the solid Vagrant+VMWare Fusion support. I've been using it
for at least the last six months and have not seen a single problem.

I've completely stopped using VirtualBox now! Good work mitchellh :)

------
thex86
VirtualBox is one of those projects that is a very important part of my daily
use. But somehow I feel that it doesn't get much love from the open source
community. Is it just me?

~~~
Argorak
VirtualBox has a quality problem:
[https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317](https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317)

This has gotten a lot better, but for quite a while `vbox` was the thing that
made my computer lock up most of the time, especially the USB drivers.

~~~
danudey
I've always found performance and stability to be quite lacking with vbox.
Parallels and VMWare are both mature, performant, frequently updated, and
well-supported, so I see little reason not to use one of those, especially
given that I'm using it for work and don't want to wait on a VM for no good
reason.

~~~
Argorak
On the other hand, Parallels and VMWare frequently charge for their updates. I
rarely find software that has such short license spans. I bought Fusion 5.0.3
in June and they already want to charge me for Fusion 6 (btw. the only version
that officially supports Mavericks). Fusion 5 is now dead in the water.

This is okay for me on a single machine, but at scale of a development team,
it gets expensive quick.

------
mathrawka
If you rely on VirtualBox, I would recommend to hold off on upgrading until
you are sure that it will not break your workflow.

The big releases tend to have a way of introducing bugs, that although get
fixed, can wreck your day if you depend on it.

~~~
JimmyL
I just upgraded to 4.3 (Win7 host, Sandy Bridge Core i7 processor), and
VirtualBox is now complaining that I've got more virtual cores (4) assigned to
my guest than I have physical cores (2) on my host.

While this is true, this wasn't an issue with 4.2. It still lets me run it,
but it's not happy about it.

EDIT: Further investigation shows that VirtualBox docs have always said this
was a bad thing to do, but didn't used to throw up a warning when you did it
anyways.

~~~
jlgaddis
> ... but didn't used to throw up a warning when you did it anyways.

This is mentioned in the changelog, FWIW.

------
riobard
“Networking improvements: A new Network Address Translation (NAT) option
allows virtual machines to talk to each other on the same host, and
communicate with the outside world. ”

This feature alone is worth the upgrade.

------
rcarmo
Nice, but a couple of months too late for me.

I've switched over to Parallels 9 on the Mac, and it is _much_ faster overall
(not to mention better USB support).

Also, I highly recommend Vagrant users to look into the vagrant-LXC plugin -
that, too, is one heck of a lot faster than using either VirtualBox or VMware
providers.

I've documented my setup here:
[http://the.taoofmac.com/space/HOWTO/Vagrant](http://the.taoofmac.com/space/HOWTO/Vagrant)

------
stevenleeg
Congrats to the virtualbox team!

I still wish they'd consider adding retina support on OS X; that's the one
thing keeping me from using it 24/7 :(.

~~~
yeukhon
I am using 4.2 branch on my retina pro from early 2013. What's the issue? Do
you have issue with launch a desktop version of Ubuntu?

I normally launch server instance so I am fine. Just curious.

~~~
stevenleeg
It doesn't have retina support, so everything looks pixelated.

~~~
yeukhon
got it. thanks!

------
chum
I used virtualbox a lot for work and play, always with a debian guest. While
my overall experience was good, there were two gotchas that really annoyed me:

1\. When cloning VMs I would always have networking issues. The fix was known
and simple
([https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/660](https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/660))
but not intuitive to a casual user.

2\. Installing the guest additions (drag-and-drop file support, shared
clipboard, basically stuff you really want) as a kernel module can be a huge
pain in the ass depending on what kernel you run. I never had any issues with
a "stable" 2.x kernel, but with 3.x I had a difficult time finding the correct
kernel headers and putting them in the correct place.

~~~
hnha
some.distros have the guest additions in their repositories, that makes it
easier.

------
codexon
I just installed 4.3 and tried running a directx9 program on XP with 3d
acceleration and it caused the VM screen to flicker and not display any
content.

I hope Vbox will catch up with VMware player on 3d acceleration soon.

~~~
pallandt
Same issue here, just different Win version. In my case it was easy to solve
since I didn't really need 3D acceleration, so I ended up disabling it.

------
walid
It is worth noting that if you don't use the new features and running
VirtualBox on old hardware there probably is no good reason to upgrade at the
moment.

------
icn2
I have used virtualbox and vmware player (free for non commercial user ).
vmware player gave me much better experience.

~~~
snowwindwaves
I have used virtualbox extensively and now have had to use VMware workstation
9 and 10 this last month and I much prefer virtual box. One more anecdote!

~~~
sahaskatta
Out of curiosity what is generally your host/guest OSes? Things had gotten
pretty buggy with VirtualBox running Ubuntu 13.04 inside a Windows 8 PC.
(Wonder if it was just me or others too.)

~~~
rebootthebox
2 out of 4 my boxes are Win 8 and I haven't noticed anything funny with Ubuntu
13.04. I use Linux guests fairly extensively.

------
pdknsk
Maybe someone from the VirtualBox team can explain to me why VirtualBox for
Ubuntu has a dependency on acroread-bin.

