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 cloning is a very useful tool."
"The flexibility and the closed platform, so it allows you to run in multiple platforms, Windows, Linux, Macintosh."
"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."
"The solution is very stable."
"This solution creates a snapshot of virtual machines so you can create test environments."
"The snapshot feature is very powerful; it protects us from disaster."
"This product is very user-friendly and easy to use."
"I think VirtualBox has good stability because I use it in an environment with several resolutions."
"The initial setup is very simple."
"The enterprise direction is very complete and the data center provides almost everything you need."
"The most valuable feature would be the slight changes they've made to VMFork instant cloning, in which they have abstracted out the parent-child relationship in cloning, in which certain features, like HA and DRS, are now usable on that parent virtual machine. That is wildly amazing and something that wasn't available until 6.7."
"The emphasis isn't specifically on a particular feature, but rather on the ease of use. For instance, when building a test lab or setting up an entire environment from scratch, VMware products are notably more user-friendly compared to alternatives like Nutanix. I've had prior experience with Nutanix. From my personal perspective, I found it easier to adapt to using VMware than when I started using Dynamics. This ease of use is a strong point. It's largely about how straightforward it is to navigate through VMware's user interface. In contrast, with Nutanix, there's a need to delve into smaller configurations and navigate vendor-specific settings. VMware, on the other hand, offers a more accessible management page. This difference primarily centres around usability and the overall user-friendliness of the interface."
"The most useful features are ESXi, DRS, Auto Deploy, and the Lifecycle Manager."
"This product is useful for running multiple virtual machines from a single server so that people can utilize the hardware resources in their organization. Its ability for backups is also valuable. In case of a disaster, you can recover the entire server from the images. It is easy to use. In terms of features, whatever they are providing is more than sufficient for us. We are not exploiting this product up to a hundred percent."
"In the past, we struggled with VM encryption. We couldn't encrypt the virtual machines with older versions of vSphere without some kind of third-party tool. Now, with 6.7, it's all in the application itself, in vSphere. We no longer have to procure additional products to meet that requirement. We can just do it on the fly, and pass our audit with no issues."
"Vmware vSphere is the benchmark of the visualization market."
"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."
"One valuable feature would be for it to work right the first time but it doesn't necessarily do that."
"The user interface needs to be improved."
"The solution is not flexible."
"The solution has to do a better job of promoting the product and its licensing capabilities."
"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."
"It should have the functionality where if I move the mouse away from one screen, the context changes automatically."
"It could improve slightly with enhanced reporting capabilities that show the current status of the network."
"Two improvements that I would like to see are higher resolution console modes for guests and easier switching between consoles."
"We have had some problems setting up the monitoring with vSphere. The process could be simplified."
"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."
"Archiving, exporting, and backing up need to be improved for this solution, because they're slower than expected."
"The documentation could be improved. It does not help me to show the client the value of going with VMware vSphere rather than an open source or cheaper solution."
"Technical support is not that great. It is too slow."
"It is expensive. They can improve the licensing cost for Cloud Director. They can also improve the integration with other applications and the metering feature, which is currently not flexible."
"Sometimes you can't find items and you need to log onto different physical servers to do technical tasks. I don't fully understand why this is the case."
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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