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Linux as a guest on MacOS X: VirtualBox or Parallels?


I'm going to develop mostly Django sites on a MacBook Pro and would like to use Ubuntu VMs for testing purposes.

Which product is better suited for this purpose?

Can I connect to the VM via TCP/IP (so I can have apache running on the VM and access it from Safari on my MBP)?

Thanks!


Solution

  • I've successfully used both VirtualBox and VMWare Fusion for this. On both systems, you can set the guest up so that it has its own IP address, and connect to it via HTTP, SSH and even native file sharing, so you can mount the guest's drive as a network drive from the Mac, and vice versa. This makes it possible to do the editing on the Mac in eg Textmate, but run the server on the VM.