Using Windows 8.1 RTM and Virtualbox 4.2.16 with bridge networking component installed results in shutdown and sleep problems Using Windows 8.1 RTM single language (English version, activated with serial provided with PC's UEFI) and Virtualbox 4.2.16 with bridge networking component installed results in shutdown and sleep problems. When I choose shutdown or sleep the display becomes dim and HDD spins down (on notebook) but the power led is on and coolers continue to work. Changing drivers for network cards, video, motherboard, etc didn't help. Temporary solution was to disable fast startup. In such a case it was possible to shutdown the system, but sleep problem was still present. Reinstalling Virtualbox with bridge networking switched off (NAT is on) helped to completely resolve the issue. Devices affected: HP envy 4 touchsmart, Acer iconia tab w700 (both using HM77 chipset and ultra low voltage CPUs: i5-3317U and i5-3337U)
I use both VirtualBox and VMWare Workstation heavily, so I'll chime in They both have different strengths and weaknesses. It may be a bit unfair to compare Workstation (a pricey product) with VirtualBox (free). Perhaps it's better to compare VMWare Player (free) to VirtualBox. However, since Workstation and VirtualBox are the two best end-user desktop virtualization products, I think it makes sense to compare them disregarding the price. VirtualBox has the advantage of having a much better configuration GUI, and wider range of hardware options you can tweak. It has excellent command-line support. Its snapshot capabilities are superior to Workstation in my opinion. It has some nice convenience advantages, such as being able to send a shutdown command to the guest by simply closing the VM window. In Workstation you can only shut down the guest with a menu command that doesn't even have a shortcut key. VirtualBox supports a wider range of guest network and sound cards (and does so better). It has superior 2D and 3D graphics acceleration support in my opinion. Perhaps most importantly for members of MDL, VirtualBox has configuration options for inserting custom DMI strings in the BIOS (for SLP 1.0 activation) or a SLIC table (for SLP 2.x activation). In Workstation, you have to custom mod the BIOS to achieve the same. In contrast, Workstation has one vital advantage that can't be overstated: it allows nested virtualization. In other words, you can run another hypervisor as a VM inside Workstation, and run additional VMs inside that. This means that you can run ESXi, Hyper-V, KVM or Xen inside Workstation (or Workstation/VirtualBox themselves). VirtualBox simply does not allow this, which is a serious shortcoming. It also means that if you want to use Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012, or Client Hyper-V inside Windows 8, and you want to run 2012/8 itself in a VM, then Workstation is the only way to do it. When you want a test lab for testing various virtualization scenarios, this is pretty crucial. In conclusion: I believe that VirtualBox is generally nicer and more convenient to work with, and provides more options and flexibility than Workstation. Hence I run the majority of my VMs in VirtualBox. However, when I require nested virtualization, I use Workstation (since I don't have any other choice). Coming back to the original post: It's not clear to me if you are talking about shutting down/putting to sleep the VM, or the host.
Many thanks for useful information. The problem I described belongs to host. Drivers for virtual networking have bug, which doesn't allow the host PC to sleep or shutdown using fast startup feature. Removing virtualbox bridge networking feature helps to solve the problem.
Haven't yet tested. Change log for 4.2.18 version contain no information about this bug, so I decided not to update Virtualbox.