Virtualization is really helpful with software testing in many ways, but I’ve always found it a bit too hard. Like, although VMWare Player is free, you need VMWare Workstation to create the machine in the first place, and if you don’t own a license you need to roll your own VMX files which is a tad fiddly.

I was looking for another way to use Watir on XP under Ubuntu and found VirtualBox. It’s cross platform, free software to run virtual machines, and is now developed by Sun. There’s an open source version, and non-open source version with more features, and both are completely free (as in beer).

The process of getting a new virtual machine up and running was quick and painless. I had it running in no time and the virtual machine runs perfectly. Nice.