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.
"The product is really good...One can get good performance because of kernel-based virtualization."
"I think nine out of the ten supercomputers in the world use Linux KVM, so I think that attests to the fact that it is a scalable product."
"Scaling the solution is easy. You just have to add more hardware."
"I appreciate the network passcode feature in KVM, as it provides a convenient way to manage DNS and cloud hosting."
"It is easy to use, stable, and flexible. It is a pretty mature product, and it is faster than VirtualBox."
"Our production servers are running in Linux, and this solution supports that environment well."
"If you prefer command-line, there are all kinds of command-line options."
"Very cost-effective."
"This solution creates a snapshot of virtual machines so you can create test environments."
"The flexibility and the closed platform, so it allows you to run in multiple platforms, Windows, Linux, Macintosh."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution were the support and performance of the product and the flexibility it gives you to work."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that there is no cost because it is open source."
"This solution can be used on many different platforms including Windows and Linux."
"VirtualBox provides an isolated, consistent environment"
"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."
"This is a good and easy solution for running virtual environments."
"The initial setup of this solution is more difficult than some of the competing products and it could be improved."
"Technical support is not top-notch."
"We would like to have a software lifecycle solution included in this solution. We can handle the software needed for KVM, but also the software that we provide. A lifecycle component would be very beneficial."
"The speed is around thirty percent slower than another competitor. This would be something to work on."
"Technical support could be better. In the next release, I would like to see an improved user interface and dashboard. This type of improvement will make it easy or help our engineers understand the solution from a requirement point of view."
"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."
"We are not getting good support from KVM, and it is not that user-friendly."
"The solution’s user interface could be improved and made more user-friendly."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"When I select the Ubuntu operating system from within the virtual machine, it sometimes hangs."
"It's not as robust as server platforms, nor does it need to be."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox is not flexible, It's not like VMware."
"I think that this solution should be more user-friendly."
"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 AI and the UI could be improved. The user interface is a little outdated and the AI is not very attractive."
"The solution needs to improve its flexibility. It's not as flexible as VMware."
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.
See our list of best Server Virtualization Software vendors.
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