Virtualization is not.

Creating a "virtual machine" with VirtualBox or VMware is misleading, no "virtual machine" is created, only a virtual view of the real underlying hardware, which must be physically present. Usually, "virtual" refers to something that doesn't exist at all, which is not the case here.

In comparison, platforms emulators are real virtual machines. For example, MAME can emulate hardware that doesn't physically exist anymore. In that sense, it can really create a "Virtual Machine".

VirtualBox and VMware server ESX

When using the VMware Infrastructure Client GUI to connect to the VMware ESX Hypervisor, I encountered a nasty problem. It was not possible to upload a Virtual Machine image, or even an iso image to boot on. Every attempt to add a file to a datastore ended with an "IO error"popup, and the file was not copied.

The GUI was running inside a Windows XP virtual machine, running inside VirtualBox.

When running the GUI from a native Windows machine, it worked.

There seems to be an issue in the way the VMware Infrastructure Client GUI interfaces the VirtualBox disk driver.

Versions used:
VMware Infrastructure Client 2.5.0.
VMware ESX Server 3i 3.5.0.
VirtualBox 1.6.4.