We performed a comparison between KVM and Oracle VM VirtualBox based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Both KVM and Oracle VM VirtualBox have their strengths and weaknesses. Oracle VM VirtualBox seems to be the more favorable choice of the two, since it offers good scalability whereas scalability seems to be an ongoing issue for KVM users.
"KVM is stable."
"Very cost-effective."
"The most valuable feature is hypervisor. I can host at the same time different operating systems in Linux Windows."
"What I like most about KVM is that it's very easy to use. Everything is built-in, even when writing command lines."
"If you prefer command-line, there are all kinds of command-line options."
"A very reliable solution which can be used for x86 architecture virtualization with reasonable overhead."
"One of the best features of KVM is its user-friendly interface."
"KVM has a rich options set which can be directly used or via wrappers, such as libvirt."
"The cloning is a very useful tool."
"I think VirtualBox has good stability because I use it in an environment with several resolutions."
"VirtualBox provides an isolated, consistent environment"
"The versatility, simplicity, and stability of the product are it's most valuable features."
"This is a good and easy solution for running virtual environments."
"The solution is very convenient and easy to use."
"The scalability of the solution is very good."
"The product’s most valuable feature is the ability to manage multiple operating systems through one application."
"Support for VF is needed, where you can, for example, export from VMware to KVM."
"I believe KVM offers a unified answer, while ProxMark addresses orchestration. KVM lacks orchestration. If the aim is to centrally oversee multiple KVMs – let's say to freeze them – a centralized management solution is absent."
"There are some issues with the graphics and some software that is very complex."
"One problem I have is that it's not very scalable when it comes to resizing the VM disk dimensions. For example, if you have initially set a virtual drive to 10 GB and you want to upgrade it to 15 GB, it's not that easy."
"KVM is very difficult to manage and run on daily operations."
"One thing that maybe could be improved is making it easier to scale. It needs to be more clear on how to scale the storage space for virtual machines."
"The grid interface of KVM needs improvement. It could be more beautiful, especially when compared to VMware."
"The main drawback in the solution is probably disaster recovery."
"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."
"When I select the Ubuntu operating system from within the virtual machine, it sometimes hangs."
"This solution needs improvement with the business continuity planning, disaster and recovery management and using centralized data storage."
"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."
"One valuable feature would be for it to work right the first time but it doesn't necessarily do that."
"It should have the functionality where if I move the mouse away from one screen, the context changes automatically."
"I think that this solution should be more user-friendly."
KVM is ranked 4th in Server Virtualization Software with 39 reviews while Oracle VM VirtualBox is ranked 5th in Server Virtualization Software with 61 reviews. KVM is rated 8.0, while Oracle VM VirtualBox is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of KVM writes "Delivers good performance because of kernel-based virtualization". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Oracle VM VirtualBox writes "The solution is versatile, simple to use, and stable". KVM is most compared with Proxmox VE, Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, VMware Workstation and Oracle VM, whereas Oracle VM VirtualBox is most compared with Proxmox VE, Hyper-V, Oracle VM, VMware Workstation and VMware vSphere. See our KVM vs. Oracle VM VirtualBox report.
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