Avoid VirtualBox; use Hyper-V or VMware in stead
Posted by jpluimers on 2023/11/10
A while ago, Jilles found out why not to use VirtualBox: [Wayback/Archive] Jilles🏳️🌈 on Twitter: “@jpluimers Ik wil op basis van wat de Arch community schreeuwt; “Virtualbox is stom, als je geen hyper-v gebruikt vraag je om problemen”, HYPER-V maar gaan proberen.” / Twitter
The biggest problem is that VirtualBox seems to be developed ant tested for the happy path, not the failing path.
Which means that when you use it for less common scenarios, it will often fail in mysterious ways.
Back in Running ArchiveTeam Warrior version 3.2 on ESXi, I already mentioned this:
Totally agreeing with Kristian Kohntopp, I do not understand why people use VirtualBox at all: I just run in too much issues like [Archive.is] Kristian Köhntopp on Twitter: “Hint: Wenn die Installation einer Linux-Distro in Virtualbox mit wechselnden, unbekannten Fehlern scheitert, hilft es, stattdessen einmal VMware Workstation oder kvm zu probieren. In meinem Fall hat es dann *jedes* *einzelne* *Mal* mit *demselben* Iso geklappt.”.
Jilles his Virtual Box Arch Linux VM after upgrading the host from Windows 10 to Windows 11 – [Wayback/Archive] Jilles🏳️🌈 on Twitter: “Virtualbox after upgrade to Windows 11 …” / Twitter
After that, I showed to know about the sunken cost fallacy in a step by step way bumping into new problems every step:
- [Wayback/Archive] Jilles🏳️🌈 on Twitter: “ArchLinux after
# pacman -Syu“
- [Wayback/Archive] Jilles🏳️🌈 on Twitter: “Booting from
Archlinux-2022.03.01.iso“
- [Wayback/Archive] Jilles🏳️🌈 on Twitter: “Pfff, one of those days…”
- [Wayback/Archive] Jilles🏳️🌈 on Twitter: “Boot from:
Systemrescue-9.01-64bit.isoI blame Windows 11 / VirtualBox”
- [Wayback/Archive] Jilles🏳️🌈 on Twitter: “…”
- [Wayback/Archive] Jilles🏳️🌈 on Twitter: “At last…”
- [Wayback/Archive] Jilles🏳️🌈 on Twitter: “Turns out I am not stupid after all… “
As a sidestep, he also bumped into a known problem that many tools still do not understand Windows directory links:
- [Wayback/Archive] Jilles🏳️🌈 on Twitter: “Windows 11… “
- I suggested to use robocopy (as it understands those links) with these parameters in front of source and destination:
/xj /s /e /x /z /eta /tbd /purge /r:1 /w:1
Note that earlier that year, Jilles already got a smaller taste on the “support” of Virtual Box for Arch Linux:
[Wayback/Archive] Jilles🏳️🌈 on Twitter: “When you boot up VirtualBox on January 1st to install an Arch 2022.01.01 VM from scratch. #fixed”
which got resolved: [Wayback/Archive] FS#73214 : Latest ArchLinux 2022.01.01 ISO will not boot automatically in EFI (on Virtualbox).
–jeroen
















Yogi Yang said
People use VirtualBox because it is free and cross platform while on the other hand VMWare is not and Hyper-V is just a pain in the butt to setup and use.