I recently had some problems where my VMplayer was running really slow for an XP guest machine on my Vista host machine. The performance was terrible -- very very unusably slow. It took 10 minutes to boot and then would have a 2-3 second lag (at least) when moving mouse and clicking on something. I have no idea why, so I thought I'd try some other options.
I decided to try Virtual Box, the free VM player from Oracle/Sun. So far, it work pretty well.
I was able to use the existing VMware disk image for my Vbox image. I copied the VMware .vmdx files from my existing directory into a new place, then created a new Vbox image and pointed it to the existing disk image. It was VERY straight forward.
The one problem I had was networking and display drivers. When I boot the machine, it didn't want to work at very well, all. It had the generic VGA driver and NO network driver. This made it hard for it to get network disk drivers.
As it turns out, the virtual ethernet control looked close enough to the VMware AMD PCnet device that it was trying to use that driver, which of course failed. Virtual Box comes with some "guest tools" that can be installed which fix the problem. I had to install the guest tools inside the XP image (mounted as CD from ISO image). I also ran the 'unpack drivers' step from the command line based on their instructions to unpack the drivers into a local directory, although I'm not sure that was needed. After installing these tools, the network adapters STILL didn't work. They were still trying to use the VMware drivers.
I fixed the problem by using "update driver" from the Device manager, then picking my own specific location and driver. It already recognized that it had the VBox AMD PCnet driver installed, but some how was priortizing the VMware one. I simply selected the VBox adapter and it started working.
Another note: I chose 'bridged adapter' in the configuration simply because the Cisco VPN client I was using in my image works better with that. I suspect it would work fine with NAT as well.
The 'guest tools' also installed and fixed the display driver so it ran a little better.
Overall: Vbox seems to be running very smoothly. I like it so far.
Side note: VirtualBox runs on Intel Macs, as well.
Rich
