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.
"Very cost-effective."
"A very reliable solution which can be used for x86 architecture virtualization with reasonable overhead."
"It offers a high-availability environment."
"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."
"The performance is great."
"I have found KVM to be scalable."
"The product is really good...One can get good performance because of kernel-based virtualization."
"What I like most about KVM is that it's very easy to use. Everything is built-in, even when writing command lines."
"I like that it has a snapshot feature."
"The flexibility as well as performance wise and as well as data volume, we have huge volume stored."
"The cloning is a very useful tool."
"I think VirtualBox has good stability because I use it in an environment with several resolutions."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its stability."
"It's a pretty good product in terms of monitoring."
"The installation is easy."
"I like that it is free and runs on Linux/Ubuntu - I wouldn't use any other solution. I am able to perform small developing tests."
"Lacks high availability across clusters as well as support for Apache CloudStack."
"The solution’s user interface could be improved and made more user-friendly."
"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."
"Business continuity features need to be added."
"We are not getting good support from KVM, and it is not that user-friendly."
"The main drawback in the solution is probably disaster recovery."
"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 networking with wireless devices needs improvement."
"The technical support needs to improve."
"There are a few bugs that need to be updated."
"It would be good if we could use Hyper-V Windows subsystems with Linux and VirtualBox on the same instance. Currently, to be able to use VirtualBox, we have to restart the machine into an instance of Windows where Hyper-V is disabled, which is understandably very inconvenient."
"The solution is a bit less stable than I would like."
"The user interface needs to be improved."
"One valuable feature would be for it to work right the first time but it doesn't necessarily do that."
"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."
"We're working with them to be able to allow the local USB ports to be ported over to the remote desktop, running VirtualBox."
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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