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 configuration and installation is pretty straightforward."
"The flexibility as well as performance wise and as well as data volume, we have huge volume stored."
"This solution creates a snapshot of virtual machines so you can create test environments."
"The solution has high performance and is easy to use."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox is easy to use."
"The flexibility and the closed platform, so it allows you to run in multiple platforms, Windows, Linux, Macintosh."
"The product’s most valuable feature is the ability to manage multiple operating systems through one application."
"The good thing is that it is multi-platform. Once you create a virtual machine in one particular environment, you can switch over to see if you can run it in other environments. For example, if you are on Windows and you create this virtual machine, you can actually go ahead and change the operating system. You can switch it over to Linux or Mac OS and see if you can run the VirtualBox on those particular machines. It even runs on some of the commercial operating systems that are not mainstream, such as Solaris and BSD. These kinds of operating systems are also supported by VirtualBox. The other thing that is good about VirtualBox is that it is open source. So, if you need to do any modifications for your own purposes, you can just download the source, modify it, and deploy it in your environment. It is pretty good and very versatile. You can create and manipulate virtual machines from the command line, which is also very important. It's something that some other products on the desktop side do not have. VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop don't have a good command-line interface to create and manipulate virtual machines, whereas VirtualBox has it out of the box, which is pretty good."
"The solution has many valuable features. Virtualization is flexible and it has simple clustering. However, the most important feature is the ability to move between VMs. The vMotion features are very good."
"The scalability has been good."
"The features in VMware vSphere data recovery are excellent. Sometimes I've deleted an entire server before and was able to recover the deleted VM. I just used some command line tools and I was able to restore the deleted VM."
"The enterprise direction is very complete and the data center provides almost everything you need."
"Provides good backup to our servers."
"vMotion is one of the most useful features, which helps to provide both flexibility and High Availability. With new versions of vSphere and vCenter, it is still improving (e.g., vMotion across vCenter Servers and virtual switches)."
"The solution is also very simple and efficient to manage. Features that have made it simple and easy to manage include the newer VAMI for the V-center appliance, it's very easy to see what version we are at, and very easy to upgrade to the next version. The fact that we can now use VCHA at the appliance level just decreases our chance of having an outage because so many of our customers rely on the API interface for V-center."
"The web console is the most valuable feature for me. Because no matter what happens with the server, I can still get to it with the web console."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox is not flexible, It's not like VMware."
"This solution needs improvement with the business continuity planning, disaster and recovery management and using centralized data storage."
"Oracle VMs don't have a solid web interface of their own. This is an area where Oracle is lagging behind. Now, we use headless servers, install Oracle VMs, and manage them remotely. We could use phpVirtual Box, but it is a third-party solution. A lot of people contribute to it, and it's not authenticated by Oracle. As a result, I don't find it to be a good option. Therefore, I would like to see Oracle offer an extension pack or a licensed version that fixes this problem."
"We're working with them to be able to allow the local USB ports to be ported over to the remote desktop, running VirtualBox."
"It's not as robust as server platforms, nor does it need to be."
"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."
"I find the solution to be incredibly unstable, constantly falling over and not working properly."
"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."
"As we introduce the DevOps culture, we need to make sure that the principles and tools used to support this approach can be easily integrated and interoperated with the vSphere environment with no (or less) redundancy in tools and functionality."
"They need to stop pushing code out so fast."
"The management could be simplified for base-level customers, but of course, it would be difficult to match all customer needs."
"Its price should be better. Their support should also be more customer-friendly, and they should train people like us so that we know more about the latest technologies and features. If there is some program and drive from their side to teach us, it is definitely going to help us. Pricing and support are the most important features for mid-level companies. We are not implementing this solution for big tech companies."
"Customer support takes a long time to respond."
"It is expensive."
"It would be good if the licensing cost of the solution could be cheaper."
"Archiving, exporting, and backing up need to be improved for this solution, because they're slower than expected."
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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