We performed a comparison between Oracle VM VirtualBox and Proxmox VE based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Oracle VM VirtualBox and Proxmox VE had a similar user rating regarding ease of deployment, pricing, service and support, and ROI. However, in terms of features, Oracle VM VirtualBox users felt the solution was unstable, whereas Proxmox VE users felt some bugs needed fixing.
"This solution creates a snapshot of virtual machines so you can create test environments."
"The installation is easy."
"Technical support is good."
"The versatility, simplicity, and stability of the product are it's most valuable features."
"The pause feature is valuable. I can pause, which is something that not all hypervisors allow. The snapshot feature is also valuable."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox has a platform where the support team responds to frequently asked questions by its users. Every time I have had issues with Oracle VM VirtualBox, I always get a solution from Oracle's online platform or GitHub."
"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 product is extremely easy to install, use, has a great GUI and is incredibly stable."
"The most valuable features of Proxmox VE are the ease of containerization. Overall the solution is generic, feature-rich, and has compatibility."
"The tool has very good performance."
"You can easily migrate VMs between hosts."
"The whole solution is good. It has good tools that help me in managing the servers. It is also stable."
"Saves a lot of time compared to imaging physical desktops."
"The solution is open source and free to use."
"I like that it's secure, and I find its Software RAID very useful. It's way better than the Hardware RAID I was used to. I'm really impressed by their Software RAID feature."
"It allows us to create an individual VM along with the GPU for machine learning."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox doesn't work properly with an antivirus tool."
"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."
"One valuable feature would be for it to work right the first time but it doesn't necessarily do that."
"The AI and the UI could be improved. The user interface is a little outdated and the AI is not very attractive."
"There are a few bugs that need to be updated."
"The installation is difficult and could be improved."
"It's not as robust as server platforms, nor does it need to be."
"We're working with them to be able to allow the local USB ports to be ported over to the remote desktop, running VirtualBox."
"I can't speak to any improvements. It is not lacking features."
"It would be nice to have total CPU and RAM allocations show for all VMs/CTs to avoid overloading an individual hypervisor."
"Currently, there are several features inaccessible through the API, necessitating the use of either the WebUI or the command line interface."
"Proxmox VE can improve the management of virtual discs. For example, if my virtual disc is 200 GB and I want to decrease it is not easy. I have to do a lot of things to decrease the size of existing virtual machines. If the Proxmox VE team can make it easy for customers to instantly increase or decrease the virtual machine hard disc, it will be very helpful for me. However, the containers I can do it easily."
"We find it difficult to find the root cause of the issues."
"We are facing issues with disk utilization and disk performance."
"Since I face issues importing Windows OVA inside Proxmox VE, a clickable button should be added to select the OVA format and import it inside Proxmox VE."
"It is a good solution, but it is very complicated in some ways. It is not easy. You must have experience in the console mode to do some configurations. A lot of documentation and YouTube videos are available that you can use to learn about it."
Oracle VM VirtualBox is ranked 5th in Server Virtualization Software with 61 reviews while Proxmox VE is ranked 1st in Server Virtualization Software with 58 reviews. Oracle VM VirtualBox is rated 8.2, while Proxmox VE is rated 8.6. 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 Proxmox VE writes "Easy to use and supports multi-monitors on multiple VMs in KVM". Oracle VM VirtualBox is most compared with KVM, Hyper-V, Oracle VM, VMware Workstation and VMware vSphere, whereas Proxmox VE is most compared with VMware vSphere, KVM, Nutanix AHV Virtualization, Hyper-V and Citrix Hypervisor. See our Oracle VM VirtualBox vs. Proxmox VE report.
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Proxmox VE is a very fast and powerful solution. It offers feature-rich virtualization, has open-standards compliance, and also includes redundancy and failover capabilities. What I like about Proxmox VE is that it lets you rack and stack two or more nodes and enables you to be up and running with a one-node failure tolerance in very little time. Proxmox VE’s integration with ZFS is also fantastic. It allows you to create pools to store your VM images and data on very easily and their great web UI makes it easy to check drive health, ZFS scrub status, and other things. I think the best part of the web UI is that everything is configurable from the web user interface without having to use the command line. It also has graphs and additional visualizations so you can evaluate the performance of everything. Beyond that, even though you can use Proxmox VE on a single server, the solution makes it easy to set up a high availability cluster on multiple hosts if needed.
Regarding Oracle VM VirtualBox, I would say its most valuable features are its virtualization, its compatibility with older OSes, and its testing of environments without causing interruptions or any harm to production. Besides making it possible to run multiple VMs on a laptop or desktop, its ease of deployment makes the solution appealing. Not only is it easy to set up, but the software is free. Moreover, it has a nice interface. However, I think Oracle VM VirtualBox could use some improvements on its reporting as well as on its network settings for VMs, which can sometimes be hard for the average user to find and understand.
Conclusion: While Oracle is a safe and excellent option when it comes to virtualizing an operating system, I would suggest Proxmox VE because it is newer, has a lot of powerful features, and is a very reliable and stable solution.