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."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."
"The snapshot feature is very powerful; it protects us from disaster."
"The versatility, simplicity, and stability of the product are it's most valuable features."
"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 flexibility and the closed platform, so it allows you to run in multiple platforms, Windows, Linux, Macintosh."
"It is a stable product."
"This solution creates a snapshot of virtual machines so you can create test environments."
"This solution can be used on many different platforms including Windows and Linux."
"The ability to to virtualize systems and run those virtual workloads with a fewer number of servers is tremendous."
"It is a single pane of glass that lets you access your hosts and VMs."
"It is fairly easy to use and has enhanced security."
"The product is very easy to install."
"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."
"This solution's most valuable feature is its High Availability."
"VMware's high availability which supports our SLA, VMware on the fly features like LUN expansion, P2V and API integrations are the most valuable features."
"The scalability of the solution is good. You can scale up to maximum levels."
"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 installation is difficult and could be improved."
"It would be good if we could use Hyper-V Windows subsystems with Linux and VirtualBox on the same instance. Currently, to be able to use VirtualBox, we have to restart the machine into an instance of Windows where Hyper-V is disabled, which is understandably very inconvenient."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox is not flexible, It's not like VMware."
"The solution should work to simplify the system. However, it should be flexible enough to allow for special cases."
"This solution needs improvement with the business continuity planning, disaster and recovery management and using centralized data storage."
"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."
"If they improve on the knowledge base and documentation, it would be extremely helpful."
"Stability and manageability need improvement."
"Here in Egypt, we would like everything free. So if you give us the license for free, we would be thrilled."
"The licensing costs are expensive and most of the important features require a license."
"Although vSphere is a nearly perfect product, it does need a little improvement. Datacenter and Cluster structure should be mixed so that the management of clusters would be easier."
"I would like to see better fault and performance reporting in the GUI."
"I would like to see AI in future releases."
"Higher cost than other similar solutions."
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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