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 versatility, simplicity, and stability of the product are it's most valuable features."
"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 flexibility and the closed platform, so it allows you to run in multiple platforms, Windows, Linux, Macintosh."
"VirtualBox provides an isolated, consistent environment"
"It's a pretty good product in terms of monitoring."
"It is a stable product."
"The snapshot feature is very powerful; it protects us from disaster."
"We saved a lot of time and hardware with this solution. It also prevents fewer incidents."
"It is a very stable solution. Integration with other environments was simple to achieve."
"Overall, it is a pretty good solution. We do not have to worry about upgrading the versions that people use for our in-house software. We just create ThinApps, and as soon as they log in, they always get the upgraded version. This part really works well for us."
"VMware vSphere allows you to run multiple virtual machines."
"Valuable features include VHA, DRS, VMotion, and redundancy and failover; any DR situation."
"The easy of use with reduced space provides a better use of infrastructure"
"An important vSphere feature from a security perspective is VM encryption. As is the right thing to do in this day and age, security needs to be the number one concern for any IT operator. While there are security solutions which can be delivered at the physical, hardware layer, they don't necessarily address all of the requirements from an encryption perspective. Being able to have VM-centric, VM-level encryption is a great feature of vSphere."
"vSphere does offer quite a bit of security stuff built-in. It is nice to know that we can have the virtual machines encrypted, so that if somebody were to get a hold of any of those files, we don't have to worry about them actually being used."
"The communications setup lags. It does not connect properly so the batching and networking is a bit slow."
"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 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."
"It could improve slightly with enhanced reporting capabilities that show the current status of the network."
"The installation is difficult and could be improved."
"When I select the Ubuntu operating system from within the virtual machine, it sometimes hangs."
"Basically, the GUI and command-line interface need improvement."
"The memory and hardware usage could be a little bit lighter. Right now, it's quite heavy on the usage. The CPU usage should be lower."
"VMware vSphere could be more secure and well-known to everyone."
"The technical support is good. However, it could be more seamless when it comes to chat support and lower response times."
"The licensing costs for the solution are quite high."
"I'd like to get rid of the Flash Client. There are still some things we need to go in there and use it for, some plugins and other things aren't supported in the HTML5."
"On the older version of VMware vSphere, possibly version four, we had a feature that allowed us to backup Ziploc machines. It has not been available in the newer version such as six or seven. I have been looking for another solution to accomplish the backups but they should bring back this plugin-type tool to allow older backup capabilities."
"The implementation of VMware vSphere is easy. For integration companies, it's easy, the final client cannot do it alone but for an implementor it's easy."
"The cost could always be lower."
"It needs to integrate better between multiple modules."
Oracle VM VirtualBox is ranked 5th in Server Virtualization Software with 61 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, VMware Workstation, Oracle VM and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). See our Oracle VM VirtualBox vs. VMware vSphere report.
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