I use VirtualBox on Windows in a corporate (domain, forest, wtf?) environment. Sometimes I wonder if some other virtualization product might be better. So win

I use VirtualBox on Windows in a corporate (domain, forest, wtf?) environment. Sometimes I wonder if some other virtualization product might be better. So windows is called the host. My guests are Debian Sid (unstable), mostly. At first, I ran an X server on windows and ran the VMs headless. Performance and convenience turned out to actually be better using Vbox's default mode: an application window which draws the contents of your virtual graphics card/monitor. With the virtualbox-guest-utils package installed[1], plus xrandr, my Xwindows desktop resizes automatically when I resize the VM application window. It's kinda cool. Backing up your host is not an excuse to not backup your guests. I have experienced total loss of a VM due to a corrupted "virtual disk" file. (The cause was a hardware problem, a read or write error on the host.) I expect that if the exact same hardware problem had happened to straight GNU/Linux instead of a GNU/Linux with a virtual disk, I would have lost a file or two, not the whole fsking system. Losing a VM after four years of use is like losing a machine after four years of use, except it's less clear how to perform forensic recovery! I agree with what others have said about Vbox file sharing being lame. I had to create ~/src (VBOX share) and ~/src-e2 (ext4) because the vbox filesystem is objectively broken by POSIX standards. It reports some capabilities exist, like changing permissions and making symlinks, but when you try to utilize them (as random applications are wont to do), they either fail with a nonsensical error (DISK FULL), or report success but don't make the change. So I created the ~/src-e2 to build projects that depend on features x, y, and z. My ext4 filesystems are also 5-10x faster for ordinary reads and writes. Of course I also have cygwin, Anaconda, three different windows-native git builds, emacs, etc on the host. Side note: if M$ really wants to embrace free software, they'd build Outlook for GNU. If not for that killer app, I'd just run Debian on this (16GB, 8-core monster) machine. 1: This wasn't so easy in 2012, it might be better now. Something about DKMS.