I’ve been using VMWare Player for ages now for both Windows development on my Linux box and (more importantly) automated testing of Windows applications.
Basically what I do is to:
- have my development VM running and I build my code and automatically transfer the install package to Linux.
- when this shows up at Linux, automatically copy a “known-state”, snapshot VM to my test work area (I say snapshot but it’s really just a backup copy of the whole directory, not a real VMWare snapshot).
- also automatically start the VM in the work area once it’s copied.
- the VM has a single never-changing startup script which pulls a real startup script from Linux and runs it.
- that startup script is responsible for getting down the install package and doing a silent install.
- it then runs a test suite and uploads results back to Linux where I have automated scripts which check them.
So, it’s basically a one-button test process.
Now I notice more and more people seem to be using VirtualBox.
First off, I’d like to confirm that it can also do a similar thing, primarily being able to backup and restore whole VMs and having shared folders between VirtualBox and Linux.
Secondly, and this is the crux: I’d like to know if that has any concrete advantages over VMWare Player, especially for the automated testing jobs.
I switched to VirtualBox because of one concrete advantage, I wasn’t able to setup the network as I wanted to in player. I don’t remember if it was bridging or port-forward or whatever that didn’t work, but something didn’t work the way I wanted it to with the network-setup (cause I needed the pay-version for that) and thus I switched. Personally I’ve found that both have good and bad sides, but I still use virtualbox cause of that network-thing.