This was my Aha! moment with virtualization. Having played around with Vmware, Xen and Virtualbox, missed this subtle feature that really makes the guest and the host OS share the desktop seamlessly. Check out the interesting post by Jack Wallen
Apart from ease of use, Virtualbox also provides fantastic performance compared to some other virtualization technologies especially if you are looking to extend your desktop to running more than one OS. There are many reasons why one would need to do that. For example for most of my work including emails, browsing, word processing, programming & development etc I am just fine with Ubuntu. Earlier Multimedia was a bit of problem on Linux due to driver support problems etc, but that too has eased out now making it the perfect setup to spend time with. However, there are still sites which run only on IE. Sure there are options such as wine but there are limitations with the same which leaves with no choice but to run windows either as a virtual machine or dual boot. With virtualbox and seamless desktop that part becomes super easy. Give it a try and you would just love it.
Another reason why virtualization has become popular with developers is ability to rapidly switch between different development setups. Sure there is an overhead of running 2 or more machines (even with virtualization) but the reduced complexity of managing setups makes it worthwhile. Think, it is a matter of time before virtualization becomes a part of everyone's computing experience. I mean I would love to have a combination of
This would be much better than dual boot systems that I work with today. Any takers?