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.
"The solution's most valuable feature is its stability."
"It's very simple to use."
"The product’s most valuable feature is the ability to manage multiple operating systems through one application."
"The cloning is a very useful tool."
"It is easy to use and does not require complex knowledge."
"The flexibility and the closed platform, so it allows you to run in multiple platforms, Windows, Linux, Macintosh."
"The product gives us the flexibility to try different machines."
"Oracle VM Virtualbox is easy to use and does not require much training."
"The whole solution is good. It has good tools that help me in managing the servers. It is also stable."
"The solution is extremely scalable."
"Proxmox VE has many containers. You need to download the image and do basic configuration, after which it is operational within a few minutes. The solution provides many containers that are light in use and don't use a lot of memory. You don't have to spend a lot of resources."
"The ability to back up a host and keep it running is valuable."
"Proxmox VE is simple to use and it is feature rich. The fact is that it performs,"
"It's very user-friendly."
"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."
"KVM hypervisor is a valuable part of the solution."
"It could improve slightly with enhanced reporting capabilities that show the current status of the network."
"We're working with them to be able to allow the local USB ports to be ported over to the remote desktop, running VirtualBox."
"This solution needs improvement with the business continuity planning, disaster and recovery management and using centralized data storage."
"They could improve the graphics functionality of the product."
"The installation is difficult and could be improved."
"We're working with them to be able to allow the local USB ports to be ported over to the remote desktop, running VirtualBox."
"The solution lacks some open source remote administration tools. The reload of individual virtual machine definitions through the vboxweb service (via its API) without restarting it and the access to shared storage (to use teleport functions) need to be improved."
"The solution should have more enterprise features, like migration, high availability storage, disaster recovery, and the ability to deploy to enterprise-scale usage. They should not just offer desktop usage."
"The scalability could be better."
"A feature which should be added is the ability to encrypt the main installation."
"If this solution could import directly from OVS format then it would make migration much easier."
"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."
"I would like to see more monitoring in the next release of this solution."
"It might be interesting to have the ability to integrate with other cloud solutions."
"The product is still a little young so it is maturing, but new features are coming out all the time."
"Its user interface can be improved. In the version that I am using, not all functions can be performed by using the UI. There can be some improvement on that. I'm assuming that it has already been improved in the latest version."
Oracle VM VirtualBox is ranked 5th in Server Virtualization Software with 10 reviews while Proxmox VE is ranked 1st in Server Virtualization Software with 24 reviews. Oracle VM VirtualBox is rated 8.2, while Proxmox VE is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Oracle VM VirtualBox writes "Simple to use, easy to configure, and reliable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Proxmox VE writes "An open-source server management platform with a useful Software RAID feature, but backup and recovery could be better". Oracle VM VirtualBox is most compared with Hyper-V, KVM, Oracle VM, VMware Workstation and VMware vSphere, whereas Proxmox VE is most compared with VMware vSphere, KVM, Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV Virtualization 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.