VirtualBox memory limitation plays spoilsport in Sharepoint 2010 installation

As a believer of virtualized development environment, I've started building the development environment for SharePoint 2010 using Sun Virtualbox. I've shared initially 1 GB of Ram out of 4 GB from my 32 Bit Vista host which eventually fell short after installing the Pre-requisites of SharePoint 2010

After facing a lot of screen freezes and high memory consumption in my guest (Windows Server 2008 SP1) I've increased the shared memory to 1.50 GB. SharePoint 2010's psconfig proved that is too low after 8 of 10th step throwing a WCF timeout exception. No luck even after relaxing the timeout values ,not able to complete psconfig and not able to pull down the processor/memory consumption

Frozen VirtualBox

So SharePoint 2010 requires more memory to be shared in its virtualized environment, there comes the issue. There's no way to increase the shared memory beyond 1500 MB with my current hardware setup(32 bit Vista Home premium with 4 GB RAM)

This limitation is forcing me to evaluate using VMware, so for the time being good bye for the cross platform hypervisor Virtualbox

Top memory comparison with VMWare

How to share files in Sun Virtual Box ?

Shared folders allow you to access files of your host system from within the guest system, much like ordinary shares on Windows networks Sharing folders in Microsoft virtual PC is much simpler than in virtual Box. Just adding the shared folder will add a new mapped icon in "my computer" to provide access to host files

This is not the case in Virtual box, sharing is accomplished using a special service on the host and a file system driver for the guest, both of which are provided by VirtualBox.To share a host folder with a virtual machine in Virtual Box, you must specify the path of that folder and choose for it a "share name" that the guest can use to access it.

After this step I'm expecting a new drive in "My Computer" as a typical Microsoft Virtual PC user. But there is no new drive. After digging into the help files, Virtual Box requires a explicit "net use" command to mount that shared drive.

net use x: \\vboxsvr\sharename

vboxsvr is a fixed name(might be helper service which runs on the guest along with Guest additions), "sharename" is the alias name which is provided while mapping the host drive

Virtual machine guest additions installation is a pre-requisite for folder sharing

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