Oracle VirtualBox... a good thing.
Now as anyone who knows me me will confirm, I have always been a long admirer of VMWare and their suite of excellent virtualisation products. I started with Workstation before switching to Fusion on OS X and finally made the jump to the way cool ESXi a few years back (I blogged about this here ). Recently however, I am finding less and less time to install guest linux OS, configuring it for use with an Oracle Database (or Application Server), making sure all the RPM's, kernel values are correct etc. Yes you can use the Oracle Validated Packages to help simplify this (see Tims comments below for how to obtain these) but what I really value these days is the simplest configuration for home / home office use that is pretty much turn on and play. After a quick trawl of the Virtual Appliances section of the VM Market Place, I was left wanting until I remembered that Oracle were now dabbling in the Virtual Machine space. After a quick dl of VirtualBox (their virtualisation offering)