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Comment by yladiz | Hacker News Reader

I don't use Docker much now, but in my experience the reliance on Virtualbox (on Mac) was a little clunky and annoying, and I really wished for native support without Virtualbox. I'm super happy to see that's here!

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I think it makes sense to depend on the "native" virtualization solutions for each operating system (Hyper-V and xhyve).

We have been using Vagrant and VirtualBox heavily and the new Docker for Windows/Mac is making us reconsider that since you can't easily use more than one hypervisor on the same dev machine without some hassle. We might be building our Vagrant boxes for these other hypervisors soon. VirtualBox still seems easier to work with but there isn't anything much exciting happening with it lately.

Let's see...

I believe xhyve works fine with recent versions of VirtualBox, since xhyve is a pure userland app (aka no kernel extensions). Check out the issues section in the xhyve readme...

https://github.com/mist64/xhyve/blob/master/README.md

xhyve needs to interact with all kinds of low-level things so there has to be kernel code involved. xhyve does not install kernel extensions of its own like VirtualBox or VMWare Fusion. xhyve uses the kernel extensions provided by Apple (com.apple.driver.AppleHV and possibly others).

Ah, that makes sense. It doesn't install anything extensions of it's own, only using the kernel bits provided by Hypervisor.framework.

In my experience, Windows is the only OS that makes it difficult to run multiple different hypervisors. I'm running multiple on my Linux and OS X machines without problems.

Virtualbox and Vmware Fusion on Mac also don't like each other, in my experience.

It's sad that Vagrant is so married to VirtualBox in practice. VirtualBox on Linux is especially bad (crashy kernel drivers).

(Yes, I know there theoretically exist different Vagrant backends, but Vagrantfiles and public images are married to specific backend so all the reasons to use Vagrant tie it to VB)

Have you tried using vagrant-libvirt on Linux? You can convert public images to run on it using vagrant-mutate.

https://github.com/vagrant-libvirt/vagrant-libvirt

https://github.com/sciurus/vagrant-mutate

I switched to VirtualBox from Parallels, and I agree that it's clunky in comparison (got tired of having to put in a purchase request every time they upgraded). I have to run IIS and MSSQL, unfortunately, and until I can use those with Docker, I think I'm stuck.

I think when Windows Nano Server is available I'll give it a try, my Win7 image is almost 70GB...

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