We performed a comparison between Oracle VM VirtualBox and VMware vSphere based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Server Virtualization Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The good thing is that it is multi-platform. Once you create a virtual machine in one particular environment, you can switch over to see if you can run it in other environments. For example, if you are on Windows and you create this virtual machine, you can actually go ahead and change the operating system. You can switch it over to Linux or Mac OS and see if you can run the VirtualBox on those particular machines. It even runs on some of the commercial operating systems that are not mainstream, such as Solaris and BSD. These kinds of operating systems are also supported by VirtualBox. The other thing that is good about VirtualBox is that it is open source. So, if you need to do any modifications for your own purposes, you can just download the source, modify it, and deploy it in your environment. It is pretty good and very versatile. You can create and manipulate virtual machines from the command line, which is also very important. It's something that some other products on the desktop side do not have. VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop don't have a good command-line interface to create and manipulate virtual machines, whereas VirtualBox has it out of the box, which is pretty good."
"The pause feature is valuable. I can pause, which is something that not all hypervisors allow. The snapshot feature is also valuable."
"This solution creates a snapshot of virtual machines so you can create test environments."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox is easy to use."
"It's very simple to use."
"Compatible with almost any operating system"
"VirtualBox provides an isolated, consistent environment"
"The most valuable aspects of the solution were the support and performance of the product and the flexibility it gives you to work."
"vSphere has enabled an enterprise class virtualization environment with a central point of monitoring and management stretched over multiple datacenters (multi-site use), adding all the features of clustering for high-availability and failover, VM migration, and operations."
"We scale it both vertically and hortizonally. We have many data centers on it."
"Valuable features really depend on different projects. We are using the traditional infrastructure based on VMware vSphere. We are also using the high availability (HA) and Distributed Switch features to extend our network and switch between different hosts. The VMotion and SVMotion features are very essential for us to relocate the storage of virtual machines to different storage or vSANs. We are using VMotion and SVMotion features several times of the day. We are also using another VMware product to replicate a lot of solutions to a second replication site."
"VMware is good for virtualization."
"Their command-line tools integrate well with other Microsoft products like PowerShell, so I can manipulate VMs using it."
"Also, the automated builds are being done through it, and we don't have to manually do it anymore. All of my AIS platforms are completely automated now with the VM suite."
"The fact that we have the ability to easily scale out, and the ability to do maintenance on the underlying hardware without impacting our business applications, are important aspects."
"I have found the solution to be flexible, and the vCenter and vMotion useful."
"The technical support needs to improve."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox doesn't work properly with an antivirus tool."
"Oracle’s support team should improve its response time."
"The solution has to do a better job of promoting the product and its licensing capabilities."
"I find the solution to be incredibly unstable, constantly falling over and not working properly."
"The solution should have more enterprise features, like migration, high availability storage, disaster recovery, and the ability to deploy to enterprise-scale usage. They should not just offer desktop usage."
"The solution needs to improve the methods used for starting and stopping the machine."
"This solution needs improvement with the business continuity planning, disaster and recovery management and using centralized data storage."
"There should be a bit more flexibility in terms of the hardware we can use with the product."
"Sometimes you can't find items and you need to log onto different physical servers to do technical tasks. I don't fully understand why this is the case."
"The setup is easy. However, the configuration expansion can be difficult. The full implementation took three to four days. This included the move from physical servers to virtual ones."
"The initial setup could be better. It manages all the setups, but it's not very straightforward, and it takes time."
"I would like to see a little bit more visibility regarding errors. When an error does occur, there are times where it says "Unknown error" or something to that effect, and it doesn't necessarily give you a lot of metrics. If you go online and you give a description of it, normally the VMware forums can help you find out what it is, but I'd like to see a little bit more visibility from the software itself regarding what's going on: "This went wrong, this is why.""
"It's inherently complex. Operating a large virtual infrastructure is not an easy task for anyone."
"The solution is stable. It has some small bugs which are not influencing the main functions but every software has some bugs."
"The UI of VMware could use some improvements, especially in dark mode."
Oracle VM VirtualBox is ranked 6th in Server Virtualization Software with 62 reviews while VMware vSphere is ranked 2nd in Server Virtualization Software with 446 reviews. Oracle VM VirtualBox is rated 8.2, while VMware vSphere is rated 8.8. 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 VMware vSphere writes "Offers good performance and is useful for banking systems". Oracle VM VirtualBox is most compared with Proxmox VE, KVM, Hyper-V, Oracle VM and Citrix Hypervisor, whereas VMware vSphere is most compared with Hyper-V, Proxmox VE, Oracle VM, VMware Workstation and IBM PowerVM. See our Oracle VM VirtualBox vs. VMware vSphere report.
See our list of best Server Virtualization Software vendors.
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