http://hollandonrails.nl/articles/484-VirtualBox-and-Ruby Over the last few years I worked with a lot of different virtualisation products. Ranging for "VMware ESX":http://www.vmware.com/products/esx/ and "XEN clusters":http://www.xen.org/ to simpeler solutions like "VMware Workstation":http://www.vmware.com/products/workstation/ and "Fusion":http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/, "Parallels":http://www.parallels.com/eu/, but also with "VirtualBox":http://www.virtualbox.org. "Innotek":http://www.innotek.de/ introduced VirtualBox 3 years ago, and since that has been bought by "Sun Microsystems":http://www.sun.com, which was recently bought by "Oracle":http://www.oracle.com. I have been using VirtualBox since the Beta, and I'm still a big fan. Over the periode of 3 years it has grown into a very rich feature set, and works on most "operating systems":http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads. Features I really like are Snapshots, the Public API, Raw hard disk access and the abillity to use VMware VMDK and Microsofts VHD disk images. Since 3.1 it also supports Teleportation, which lets you migrate your VM live (with no downtime) from one physical machine to an ohter. Now you might wonder why I would write this on a Ruby blog? Well, there is a very nice "VirtualBox gem":http://github.com/mitchellh/virtualbox which allows you to manage your VM's using Ruby. It is modeled after ActiveRecord, so most of you should feel right at home. To get started, just follow the "Getting Started Guide":http://mitchellh.github.com/virtualbox/file.GettingStarted.html