For the purposes of our tests and for limiting the scope of the review of both VirtualBox 3.20 and VMware Workstation 7.1, I decided to concentrate on Windows XP and Windows 7 64-bit and 32-bit ...

Oracle's VM VirtualBox is a powerful, free, and open-source virtualization tool—but you'll have to do some tinkering to make it work for you.

Desktop virtualization for pros For IT professionals, VMware Workstation and Oracle VirtualBox are the two leading options for creating and running VMs.

Testing VirtualBox I tested VirtualBox by installing Windows 7 64-bit, and the entire operation was smooth and quick.

Learn More. Oracle VM VirtualBox continues to nip at the heels of undisputed virtualization leader VMware, resulting in a bounty of choice for application developers, IT pros and power users.

VirtualBox is flexible enough to handle many types of 32-bit and 64-bit configurations. If you need to run a 32-bit version of XP in a 64-bit host, you can do that without any problems.

On the security side, VirtualBox now offers AES 128/256-bit encryption for all VM data, logs and configuration files as default, without affecting performance, Oracle said.

VMware has a press release on their website that announces the release and availability of version 3.0 of Fusion, which brings 64-bit support along with other enhancements to the software.

After entering beta roughly three months ago, Oracle’s VM VirtualBox 5.0 virtualization software is now generally available, offering faster performance and better security.