Well, I'm excited by the potential of having something better than Virtualbox available for free.
I tried converting a linux vm I frequently use via vagrant just now, and it seems to work well except for network bridging: You can't bridge over wifi. Kindof a deal-breaker.
The relevant page[1] explains it thus: "Due to features of wireless protocol, level 2 bridges don’t work over Wi-Fi, and so you can’t use wireless interface of your Mac to route bridge traffic to external network – only among VMs and host."
Just take a look at VBoxManage --help for a crazy list of settings and features that VBox has accumulated during the past ~10 years.
It even supports ATA TRIM so your fs-driver can discard blocks and keep the VDI-file deflated at all times.
Performance-wise: Compiling stuff within VBox on an i7 quad-core (-j5) is almost as fast as native. X on Linux-VMs feels native too, especially when running in fullscreen.
Out of curiosity, have you tried anything other than VirtualBox (e.g. VMware Fusion)?
I was happy with VirtualBox's (on OS X) performance until I bought VMware Fusion. I didn't do any benchmarks so I don't have numbers to back up my claim but it definitely "felt" much faster than VirtualBox.
I never tried VMF so it may be faster, sure. The thing about VBox is, like I wrote, features. VBox is basically a full-featured Virtualization-Suite, has multiple UIs and an API. It is also available on Win7,8,10/macOS/Linux and Solaris.
You may add: excellent documentation and friendly support (board, irc, list).
If I'll ever have to switch, I'd first need feature-parity.
I have a current `docker-compose`-based dev-setup, which I'd like to move out of Docker for Mac because of instability and into a Linux VM.
One dirty detail is that the Docker containers need to communicate with the host machine (the dev-Mac). Would this be achievable with the limited bridge that Veertu supports?
Bridging to a wireless interface is done differently from bridging to a wired interface, because most wireless adapters do not support promiscuous mode. All traffic has to use the MAC address of the host's wireless adapter, and therefore VirtualBox needs to replace the source MAC address in the Ethernet header of an outgoing packet to make sure the reply will be sent to the host interface. When VirtualBox sees an incoming packet with a destination IP address that belongs to one of the virtual machine adapters it replaces the destination MAC address in the Ethernet header with the VM adapter's MAC address and passes it on. VirtualBox examines ARP and DHCP packets in order to learn the IP addresses of virtual machines.
I tried converting a linux vm I frequently use via vagrant just now, and it seems to work well except for network bridging: You can't bridge over wifi. Kindof a deal-breaker.
The relevant page[1] explains it thus: "Due to features of wireless protocol, level 2 bridges don’t work over Wi-Fi, and so you can’t use wireless interface of your Mac to route bridge traffic to external network – only among VMs and host."
[1] https://veertu.com/knowledgebase/vagrant-setup-instructions/