We performed a comparison between Oracle VM VirtualBox and Proxmox VE based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Oracle VM VirtualBox and Proxmox VE had a similar user rating regarding ease of deployment, pricing, service and support, and ROI. However, in terms of features, Oracle VM VirtualBox users felt the solution was unstable, whereas Proxmox VE users felt some bugs needed fixing.
"It is easy to use and does not require complex knowledge."
"The solution is very convenient and easy to use."
"This product is extremely easy to install, use, has a great GUI and is incredibly stable."
"The solution has high performance and is easy to use."
"This is a highly scalable solution."
"I like that Oracle VM is safe and stable. It is also very easy to administer. For example, opening a VM or adding a host adapter is extremely easy."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that there is no cost because it is open source."
"This solution creates a snapshot of virtual machines so you can create test environments."
"It's very user-friendly."
"The backup service, which was released recently, and that we are already using, is wonderful."
"The affordability of the solution is the product's most valuable aspect."
"Proxmox VE has many containers. You need to download the image and do basic configuration, after which it is operational within a few minutes. The solution provides many containers that are light in use and don't use a lot of memory. You don't have to spend a lot of resources."
"Its compatibility is most valuable."
"The most valuable feature of Proxmox VE is its ease of use."
"The initial setup was really straightforward and easy."
"The solution is easy to install. It can run on a lot of different types of hardware. Creating virtual machines with it is really easy."
"The solution needs to improve its flexibility. It's not as flexible as VMware."
"Oracle VMs don't have a solid web interface of their own. This is an area where Oracle is lagging behind. Now, we use headless servers, install Oracle VMs, and manage them remotely. We could use phpVirtual Box, but it is a third-party solution. A lot of people contribute to it, and it's not authenticated by Oracle. As a result, I don't find it to be a good option. Therefore, I would like to see Oracle offer an extension pack or a licensed version that fixes this problem."
"It could improve slightly with enhanced reporting capabilities that show the current status of the network."
"The solution lacks some open source remote administration tools. The reload of individual virtual machine definitions through the vboxweb service (via its API) without restarting it and the access to shared storage (to use teleport functions) need to be improved."
"Having live migrations to move a running server to other hardware would be great."
"It has some issues when you have some weird device drivers. For instance, when you have a weird sound driver working on your machine, and the VirtualBox needs to output the sound of the virtual machine into the sound driver of the physical machine, the bare metal, it doesn't work too well. If you tweak lots of drivers and play around with the different kinds of drivers and machines, you will probably break something. I have not played with it too much and maybe it already supports it, but it would probably be good to have the ability to use a container from the virtual machine environment instead of spinning off a complete virtual machine. There are other tools for that. On Linux, you have a DXE, LXC framework, and you have Docker as well. Docker is good because it is multi-platform, and you can run Docker on pretty much anything, even different processors, but it would be good if we had a VirtualBox running on it while spinning off containers instead of full virtual machines. The other thing that will become important, and I'm pretty sure that they are thinking about it as well is that there's this new hardware platform that Apple is releasing, which is an ARM-based new chip. So, VirtualBox will probably have to work on ARM-based CPUs as well."
"The user interface needs to be improved."
"This should have better support for multiple network cards and some parts of the GUI should be improved."
"Lacking in enterprise features."
"There are some things that need to be done using the command-line interface, and these should be moved into the web-based interface."
"It is difficult to remove a virtual machine."
"The solution needs to improve its stability."
"The tool needs to add a lot of containers."
"I would like to see more monitoring in the next release of this solution."
"Proxmox VE needs to make a deal with Veeam. I was also unable to make version upgrades. I have also encountered backup problems."
"The availability of the solution could be a bit better."
Oracle VM VirtualBox is ranked 5th in Server Virtualization Software with 61 reviews while Proxmox VE is ranked 1st in Server Virtualization Software with 58 reviews. Oracle VM VirtualBox is rated 8.2, while Proxmox VE is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Oracle VM VirtualBox writes "The solution is versatile, simple to use, and stable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Proxmox VE writes "Easy to use and supports multi-monitors on multiple VMs in KVM". Oracle VM VirtualBox is most compared with KVM, Hyper-V, Oracle VM, VMware Workstation and VMware vSphere, whereas Proxmox VE is most compared with VMware vSphere, KVM, Nutanix AHV Virtualization, Hyper-V and Citrix Hypervisor. See our Oracle VM VirtualBox vs. Proxmox VE report.
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Proxmox VE is a very fast and powerful solution. It offers feature-rich virtualization, has open-standards compliance, and also includes redundancy and failover capabilities. What I like about Proxmox VE is that it lets you rack and stack two or more nodes and enables you to be up and running with a one-node failure tolerance in very little time. Proxmox VE’s integration with ZFS is also fantastic. It allows you to create pools to store your VM images and data on very easily and their great web UI makes it easy to check drive health, ZFS scrub status, and other things. I think the best part of the web UI is that everything is configurable from the web user interface without having to use the command line. It also has graphs and additional visualizations so you can evaluate the performance of everything. Beyond that, even though you can use Proxmox VE on a single server, the solution makes it easy to set up a high availability cluster on multiple hosts if needed.
Regarding Oracle VM VirtualBox, I would say its most valuable features are its virtualization, its compatibility with older OSes, and its testing of environments without causing interruptions or any harm to production. Besides making it possible to run multiple VMs on a laptop or desktop, its ease of deployment makes the solution appealing. Not only is it easy to set up, but the software is free. Moreover, it has a nice interface. However, I think Oracle VM VirtualBox could use some improvements on its reporting as well as on its network settings for VMs, which can sometimes be hard for the average user to find and understand.
Conclusion: While Oracle is a safe and excellent option when it comes to virtualizing an operating system, I would suggest Proxmox VE because it is newer, has a lot of powerful features, and is a very reliable and stable solution.