virtualbox is more efficient for low-resource systems, such as a netbook, in my experience. otherwise either should work for you.

Cliff,

I run both virtual environments and also like Sun Vbox the best and it has very full-features; plus is free forever. I have had less configuration problems with it as well and thought that it has more features than VMWare (at least in the versions I tested). I recommend to try both as business usually uses VMWare and so it is valuable to have the experience with both (if you have the time). Primarily using VBox, I also loaded Linux (Ubuntu) as host and XP (Pro) as a guest, and the reverse where I had XP (Pro)as host and Linux (Ubuntu)as guest; both ran fine. The installation for XP (Pro) as the host took the typical hour that XP (Pro)always does and Ubuntu as the guest much short/faster to install inside it, but the reverse install actually took hours. XP (Pro) as guest was extremely slow to install on Linux as the guest OS. I know has to be related to my PC configuration, which was a Dell desktop with only 1 Gig of RAM.

I've used both, and for a simple, single-system installation running a couple VMs, I really like VirtualBox. I have it running on an Ubuntu-based laptop and currently have a couple MS distros and 3 different Linux distros as virtual boxes. Can get pretty processor-intensive if I have more than 4 active with a bunch of processes running (especially the MS boxes), but hasn't crashed on me. HTH.

Doug

I've been using virtualbox for the last few years myself, used to use vmware workstation at a company then the vmware player at home but virtualbox is a lot easier.

That being said I'm revisiting the choice. I have a laptop I'm dedicating as a host, will the free ESXi run on top of Linux but run the guests automatically? I want to have it run as a server, boot and a couple virtuals come up automatically. Or can I do that with virtualbox?