Our goal is to provide JumpBoxes that run anywhere there is virtualization infrastructure available.
The Standard JumpBox download you get by clicking any download button on our site will run on a broad array of virtualization platforms. Unless otherwise noted, the platforms listed below apply to the Standard JumpBox download.
Tier 1
Fully supported.
| Virtualization Platform | Host Platform | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| VMware Fusion | Mac OS X | |
| VMware Player (Free) | Windows, Linux | |
| VMware Server (Free) | Windows, Linux | |
| VMware Workstation | Windows, Linux | |
| VMware ESX | Bare Metal | Standard downloads must be converted to run on ESX. For better support, alternative builds in OVF format are available to JumpBox Open Premium subscribers. |
| Amazon EC2 | Cloud | This is an alternative build. All JumpBoxes are available as AMIs to JumpBox Open Plus and Premium subscribers. To run a JumpBox on Amazon EC2 you'll need to use ElasticFox. See this blog post for details.
If you are a JumpBox Open Plus or Premium subscriber and would like to enable access to the AMIs for your account please contact support for assistance. Note: Usage charges for Amazon EC2 will be billed by Amazon. |
Tier 2
Supported but with limitations noted below.
| Virtualization Platform | Host Platform | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Parallels Desktop | Mac OS X | No guest tools support. |
| Parallels Server | Mac OS X, Bare Metal | No guest tools support. |
| Parallels Workstation | Windows, Linux | No guest tools support. |
| Microsoft Virtual Server | Windows | No guest tools support. Virtual Server also has relatively poor performance compared to more modern virtualization systems. A manual, post setup modification to the JumpBox is necessary. |
| Microsoft Virtual PC | Windows | No guest tools support. Virtual PC also has relatively poor performance compared to more modern virtualization systems. |
| Virtual Iron | Bare Metal | No guest tools support. |
Tier 3
Known to work but not yet officially supported. You can run JumpBoxes on these platforms but our ability to provide assistance is limited.
| Virtualization Platform | Host Platform | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| VirtualBox | Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, Solaris | Works fine but there are some minor complexities in VM configuration that keep it out of the supported tiers. See this blog post for a walkthrough on how to get a JumpBox running on VirtualBox. |
| Sun xVM Server | Bare metal | We haven't tested this but Sun engineers have reported that JumpBoxes run fine using the VMDK files from the download. VMDK is the native disk format for xVM Server. |
| Xen Open Source | Linux | This is relatively difficult to configure, depends heavily on the Linux distribution and requires running Xen in fully virtualized mode. JumpBoxes will run fine on Xen, but we're limited in the amount of assistance we can provide due to the large number of variables involved in Xen Systems. |
| KVM | Linux | This works but is not something that we test regularly. The developer of libvirt has a blog post discussing how to run a JumpBox using it. |
| QEMU | Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris among others | Works but since this is emulation performance is very poor. Can be used to run JumpBoxes on non-intel platforms if you have the need for some reason. Useful for test and development. Too slow for production usage. |
| Oracle VM | Linux | This is Xen based and we have heard of people using it but have never tested it. |
Currently unsupported
Known to NOT work but will in the future.
| Virtualization Platform | Host Platform | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Hyper-V | Windows | (the latest release of Hyper-v has moved this from Tier 2 to Tier 4 as people are getting black screens on boot.) No guest tools support and configuration has more steps than we typically like. You can see the details in this video. Here's the quick summary: create a virtual machine, attach all the disks, add a "Legacy Network Adapter" and attach it to the correct interface. The boot.hdd file will also need to be renamed boot.vhd in order for Hyper-V to see it. Running a JumpBox on Hyper-V R2 requires a simple modification to the JumpBox disk files. |
| Citrix XenServer | Bare Metal | No suitable import format. It might be possible to use Project Kensho to use the OVF format for import but this has not been tested. |
| Parallels Virtuozzo Containers | Linux | This is a very different kind of system that we can't quite support yet. We are working on this and our goal is to support this platform at the Tier 1 level. |
| OpenVZ | Linux | This is the Open Source base of Parallels Virtuozzo Containers and will be supported at the same point we introduce Virtuozzo support. |
