Unfortunately, the Record/Playback feature is incompatible with another of Workstation 6.0’s new features: USB 2.0 device support. To enable Record/Playback, you must remove the USB controller from the VM’s configuration. You also need to remove any virtual IDE devices — the feature works with virtual SCSI adapters only. This, in turn, causes other problems, as Windows XP, for one, doesn’t natively support the BusLogic virtual device employed by VMware. It’s a classic catch-22 that undermines the usefulness of an otherwise promising feature.

I tested VMware Workstation 6.0 Beta 3 on a Dell XPS M1710 laptop running Windows Vista Ultimate. Though I’ve never been a fan of the product’s tabbed window layout, I found the Workstation 6.0 interface — like that of its predecessor — to be uncluttered and generally easy to navigate. However, the product needs to provide more feedback on the impact of the various configuration options. For example, when creating a new Windows XP VM, the recommended disk controller was IDE. Also, USB support was enabled by default — both showstoppers that kept the VM from booting when I enabled the new Record/Replay feature. Worse still, there’s no easy way to convert from IDE to SCSI or vice versa, so the wrong choice at the beginning can lead to much wasted time later on.

Configuration faux pas aside, VMware Workstation 6.0 is a worthwhile upgrade that should help solidify the company’s position as the dominant VM platform for developers and support professionals.

Click for larger view.

InnoTekVirtualBox 1.3
InnoTek is one of those Thinstall-like vendors that managed to carve out a healthy niche for itself while essentially flying under the radar of most IT shops. That niche turned out to be the European Union’s government and military institutions, with a splash of OEM licensing (IBM is a customer) thrown in for good measure.

Resembling in many ways a more modular Virtual PC but with a VMware-like breadth of host and guest OS support, VirtualBox is at once exciting and frustrating: exciting because of its potential, especially as an open source option; frustrating because of lingering bugs and performance issues that plague the most recent release.

First, the good: As currently constituted, VirtualBox is a flexible, highly configurable virtualization platform. Compatible with both Windows and Linux hosts, it provides an impressive array of basic features, including USB support (both local and remote) and a rudimentary snapshot capability. It also boasts formidable extensibility features, such as a rich command line syntax and COM/DCOM interoperability.

VirtualBox’s modularity extends to the product’s UI, which can be decoupled from the VM runtimes, allowing them to run “headless” in the background. Add to this its own optimized RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) server and you have a potent virtualization solution that is free to download for personal use (the company also offers an open source version without RDP capability).

The product, unfortunately, is marred by numerous user interface bugs (the VirtualBox control shell tended to crash randomly), a cryptic error message format that left me scratching my head on more than one occasion, and a complete lack of 64-bit (host or guest) OS support. VirtualBox is also an underwhelming performer. In my client/server benchmark tests, Microsoft’s Virtual Server 2005 R2 (SP1) proved two to four times faster than InnoTek’s offering — placing VirtualBox dead last among our roundup participants.