Virtualbox (I tried with the latest as of late January) would not run Skype for me.

VMware worked immediately.

Why would you want to run Skype in virtualbox? Skype runs on Mac, Windows and Linux.

Because you don't trust skype not to dick up your real computer?

Sounds valid.

I've actually set up Skype on Virtualbox with no problems. I needed to test a Skype plugin once and had 4 Skype instances running on the same machine (3 virtual, one native). Later Skype versions break with Virtualbox, but older versions work fine.

I guess this http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VBox_vs_Others makes it clear

This is an inaccurate comparison to VMWare Fusion. There are many features, e.g. Bootcamp partition virtualization, that virtualbox either forgot to mention or purposely excluded.

VirtualBox can actually do physical-partition virtualization, but you have to produce a VMDK file that points to the partition you want, and use that as the virtual disk. (Oh, and run VBox as root.) Conveniently, I've written some code to produce such a file: https://github.com/vasi/vmdk-raw-parts . Enjoy!

Aha, cloned! Thanks for this. I had to make my VMWare vmdk for my GPT partition by hand :-). I've been dreading the day when my disk changes and I have to recreate it. Now I will not.

Neat, I assume this preserves FS changes upon native boot?

Yup, it's using the physical partition, so all changes are preserved. Whether you want that or not.

I suppose you could use a snapshot VMDK to put the FS changes into a file, which you could then keep or discard. No idea if VBox or even VMWare actually supports this behaviour. Nor can I think of any particularly good use for it!

You can set up VirtualBox to use a physical (ie. Bootcamp) partition or disk. It's not as easy as in Parallels, but it isn't difficult and is explained well in the manual.

What you can do and what the product supports are two different things.

In the case of a free product like VirtualBox where you're not paying for tech support, there isn't a difference.

Unless you mean that there is a difference between what merely happens to work and what the developers strive to ensure works. In this case, VirtualBox definitely "supports" using physical disks and partitions (though they describe it as an "advanced" feature).

I wonder why they don't have parallel port support.

Because most things you would want to do with parallel port that actually work through all the layers of virtualization and emulation (ie. connecting a printer) can be done equally well with emulated serial port.

Yes, and it has some of its own user experience issues. I upgraded to 4.0.4 last week on Windows 64, and every time you upgrade it resets all of your network adapters (yes, probably a windows issue). Nevertheless, couldn't upgrade from 4.0.0 to 4.0.4 directly, the installer hung and left me hanging without network access of any sort till I rebooted. Ended up having to install 4.0.2 first, which was never mentioned in the "Check for updates", so I didn't have

When it works it's awesome, but the installer almost always hangs on me also -- I think it's during some network card driver bit. It's an old problem that doesn't seem to be getting fixed.

From trying to use it recently, it's worth pointing out that the 3D support in VirtualBox is not up to the standard of VMWare's, if you want DirectX. Obviously that's not important to everybody, but hopefully it will save some people a few hours of experimentation.

I'm sure they'll improve it in time though, and VirtualBox is otherwise a fine piece of software.