With all there is to really like about Virtualbox’s approach to VMs, one thing really stands out as a sore thumb: VMs sharing resources with the host machine. As in, “sharing” is not the word for some resources.
USB-attached devices? Well, using them in the VM (via VBox Guest Additions) means hogging them in the VM. No access via the host machine while the VM is making use of those resources–printer, external drives, etc. Ditto for optical drives. Designating ones physical DVDRW or CD or whatever as usable by the VM “uninstalls” it from the host machine.
Not really cool.
Well, at least resources can be shared in that limited sense, but it really sucks dead bunnies through a straw.
OK, so “plugging in” and “unplugging” does allow sharing back and forth in a klunky kind of way. But man, it’s cumbersome. It’s probably the only thing I liked better about M$’s Virtual XP: sharing resources was less kludgy.
And yeh, I wrote this while in a rare instance of XP running in a VB VM. Why so rare? Well, I never really warmed to XP to begin with and only invoke it now whenever I need to check some XP-specific procedure. Otherwise, Puppy or Mint or an occasional PCBSD (I really, really like PCBSD, but for some reason only rarely use it; I need to examine that) are just fine for me. Running on a Win7 host.