Virtualisation mess

I have downloaded the Fedora 7 installation DVD ISO and wanted to give it a try in a virtual machine. I am using VMWare Server already for some time as it was the first free (as in free beer) available feature-complete and fast virtualisation software. I Created a virtual disk, configured the ISO as source for the CD device, and started up the virtual machine. But then while booting the Fedora 7 kernel, VMWare just crashed, also making my host OS unstable, so I had to do a hard reset. I was still using VMWare Server 1.0.1, so I tried an upgrade to 1.0.2 with latest vmware-any-any patch, but all to no avail: VMWare just keeps on crashing.

Now there’s also Virtualbox, which is freely (as in free speech!) available, so this seemed like an excellent time to give it a try. Virtualbox is packaged for Mandriva, so urpmi virtualbox should suffice to install it. It automatically installs some dkms-virtualbox package, probably containing drivers for virtual network cards and such, like VMWare does too. But while compiling these modules, it bombed out with some compilation errors, and a warning that Virtualbox is not tested with kernels > 2.6.17. As I’m using 2.6.21 x86_64 tmb kernel, and I did not immediately find a reference to this error on Google, I’m stuck here I’m afraid. Let’s hope new versions of VMWare Server or Virtualbox fix these issues soon. In the meantime, I’ll continue to use VMWare Server.