Simple question. Is BOINC heaed to VM's? If so, how well will they be tested?

There is one project in beta trying to use and Oracle VM. I cannot say how well it is doing. But there have been constant problems in getting the thing to work. I went through some bad times, then great success, and then utter failure. Even though I had unending help, for me the thing has been a monster. I let it all out in the forums, hoping that baring my problems would help the admins. No such luck for me. The project is stuck at a level os users that I believe to be insignificant

We crunchers have gotten along forever without the use of such technology. I see no reason for any change in that direction.

So, I would just like to know, are we headed to more VM's, and, if so, how well will they be vetted.

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Nice to see you. I hope that BOINC does a better job with the VM technology than has the current group.

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The problem I see with using a VM is that you have to allocate resources to them before they are launched. It runs as if on a different computer. Most of my hardware does not have the capacity to allocate away enough resources and still have enough for the core OS.
It is fine if the PC harware is a multi-core CPU with 4-6-8 GB of RAM and .5 TB Hdd's... But for us poor blokes using strapped together hardware salvaged from the PC's others have abandoned, it is probably not going to work.

I understand that LINUX is free, and has gotten a lot easier to install and manage ( like windows ), but we are not all science geeks, PC geeks, Nerds extrordinare....I like to install BOINC, Add the projects that the hardware can support and leave it alone.

My 2.3 cents ( adjusted for inflation and the drop in the value of the almighty dollar )

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Crunching for SCIENCE not CREDITS.

... but we are not all science geeks, PC geeks, Nerds extrordinare....I like to install BOINC, Add the projects that the hardware can support and leave it alone.

That is exactly the point, I am glad that someone else made this point, which probably reflects the vast majority of the 291,000 current BOINC users.

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I think Oracle (owns VirtualBox), T4T and BOINC are all collaborating on the effort to integrate BOINC and VirtualBox. Without T4T's groundbreaking work on using VirtualBox with BOINC none of this would have happened. The BOINC developers are far from being the lead, it's a 3 party team of equals, AFAIK.

You may want to read up on the documentation.

The original Workshop where Ben Segal asked about possibilities to look into using a virtual machine environment in BOINC, was the one hosted by CERN in 2007.

After that, [trac]Wiki:VmApps[/trac] and [trac]Wiki:VirtualBox[/trac] are very enlightening. The first Vboxwrapper was created [trac]changeset:22745[/trac] on the 24th of November, 2010 and [trac]changeset:22753[/trac] on the 29th of November, 2010; a full 2 months before T4T started according to its news archive.

Now, for me the interesting thing about the VmApps page is the TODO list:
* Test other hypervisors than VirtualBox (VMware, kQEMU, etc.)

I would think that for people like Mitrichr where Virtual Box is really not working, for whatever weird reason, that an alternative VM program would be an option. Definitely something to check into.

* Test other host OS's than Linux (Ubuntu 9.04)

Waiting for a Windows CE open source version. ;-)

And plenty of other stuff on that to do list.

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