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.
"Our production servers are running in Linux, and this solution supports that environment well."
"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."
"It offers a high-availability environment."
"There is a strong emphasis on availability, and they have numerous API interfaces for distributed storage and the solution is quite known for its openness."
"The GUI interface makes the management of KVM easier than ever before."
"I have found KVM to be scalable."
"A very reliable solution which can be used for x86 architecture virtualization with reasonable overhead."
"I like that this is an open-source solution. It is very powerful, and it's easy."
"The versatility, simplicity, and stability of the product are it's most valuable features."
"VirtualBox provides an isolated, consistent environment"
"I think VirtualBox has good stability because I use it in an environment with several resolutions."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to copy bidirectionally between the desktop and the virtual machine."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution were the support and performance of the product and the flexibility it gives you to work."
"The solution has high performance and is easy to use."
"The pause feature is valuable. I can pause, which is something that not all hypervisors allow. The snapshot feature is also valuable."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that there is no cost because it is open source."
"The virtual manager and the graphical QEMU for KVM need some improvement."
"The product must provide better performance monitoring features."
"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."
"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."
"I have encountered difficulties in getting the tool's documentation."
"Monitoring and resolution could be improved."
"Some things are pretty basic, and they could be more robust with more detail."
"Support for VF is needed, where you can, for example, export from VMware to KVM."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox doesn't work properly with an antivirus tool."
"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."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox is not flexible, It's not like VMware."
"The user interface needs to be improved."
"There are a few bugs that need to be updated."
"They could improve the graphics functionality of the product."
"It should have the functionality where if I move the mouse away from one screen, the context changes automatically."
"Oracle needs to improve its hot virtual machine migration. It didn't work as intended. It should allow us to migrate between virtual machines, without stopping the database."
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.
We monitor all Server Virtualization Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.