We performed a comparison between Oracle VM VirtualBox and VMware Workstation based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Proxmox, VMware, Microsoft and others in Server Virtualization Software."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 is very stable."
"This is a highly scalable solution."
"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."
"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."
"It is a stable product."
"This solution can be used on many different platforms including Windows and Linux."
"VMware Workstation is easy to manage and understand."
"It will not harm any of the computer settings to run a specific program. For example, if a program needs a specific security policy, we don't have to use the shared configuration. We have an individual copy of Windows installed on the virtual machine, so anybody can access that. It helps us a lot."
"We can undo some changes using the snapshot feature."
"Because the setup is so easy, this is a solution that can be used at a moment's notice."
"The product is stable, very easy to deploy, easy to use, easy to configure, and easy to set up."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it is an easy-to-use product."
"I haven't faced any inconveniences working with this solution. It is very easy to use."
"It's stable."
"We're working with them to be able to allow the local USB ports to be ported over to the remote desktop, running VirtualBox."
"When I select the Ubuntu operating system from within the virtual machine, it sometimes hangs."
"The installation is difficult and could be improved."
"The solution should work to simplify the system. However, it should be flexible enough to allow for special cases."
"The solution is a bit less stable than I would like."
"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."
"Basically, the GUI and command-line interface need improvement."
"The user interface needs to be improved."
"The support can be improved."
"I would like to see more detailed reporting capabilities, particularly around snapshot activity. It would be helpful to have a summary of changes made prior to deploying an application, allowing us to provide comprehensive reports to our management on a regular basis."
"Installing VMware Workstation isn't so easy. It's highly complex compared to Windows. I rate it four out of 10 for ease of installation. Setting up a remote desktop only takes a minute or so, but the Workstation itself takes some time."
"Performance could be improved, it's somewhat clunky."
"The product’s virtual machine data backup feature needs upgrading."
"The solution should provide a guide on its installation."
"The solution can be expensive."
"It would be helpful if VMware Workstation included an in-built monitoring tool for monitoring things."
Oracle VM VirtualBox is ranked 5th in Server Virtualization Software with 62 reviews while VMware Workstation is ranked 2nd in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) with 42 reviews. Oracle VM VirtualBox is rated 8.2, while VMware Workstation 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 Workstation writes "An easy-to-manage solution that has really good customer support compared to other market players". Oracle VM VirtualBox is most compared with Proxmox VE, KVM, Hyper-V, Oracle VM and VMware vSphere, whereas VMware Workstation is most compared with Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, KVM, VMware Fusion and Microsoft Remote Desktop Services.
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