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 initial setup was straightforward."
"The versatility, simplicity, and stability of the product are it's most valuable features."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox is easy to use."
"Technical support is good."
"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 configuration and installation is pretty straightforward."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to copy bidirectionally between the desktop and the virtual machine."
"This product is very user-friendly and easy to use."
"I think that the solution is perfect. It's the best on the market."
"It's extremely simple. Installing the ESXi is a piece of cake and then putting servers on there is really simple and having HA and building a cluster for our VM servers. It's very easy."
"It is a very dependable solution. Its performance is very good, and it is also easy to manage and implement."
"We don't have any downtime because it was built right."
"It's very transparent and independent."
"We scale it both vertically and hortizonally. We have many data centers on it."
"VMotion is the biggest feature. It gives us the ability to move things on the fly."
"The solution's flexibility allows us to implement it widely."
"Having live migrations to move a running server to other hardware would be great."
"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 technical support needs to improve."
"It could improve slightly with enhanced reporting capabilities that show the current status of the network."
"This solution needs improvement with the business continuity planning, disaster and recovery management and using centralized data storage."
"We're working with them to be able to allow the local USB ports to be ported over to the remote desktop, running VirtualBox."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox doesn't work properly with an antivirus tool."
"One valuable feature would be for it to work right the first time but it doesn't necessarily do that."
"VMware vSphere could be improved with cheaper costs."
"They must work on the price, as well as the technical support."
"There should be a bit more flexibility in terms of the hardware we can use with the product."
"In future releases, I would like to see less pricing. The license can be improved."
"The biggest thing to improve is to have more self-service in the portals. I would like to receive more help through the web interface."
"It could be more scalable."
"It could be more composable. At present, a fluid pool is not available to us. It would be great to have the flexibility."
"The licensing costs for the solution are quite high."
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, Oracle VM, VMware Workstation and IBM PowerVM. See our Oracle VM VirtualBox vs. VMware vSphere report.
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